Authors: Michael E. Rose
Ackermann's girlfriend was indeed very young and very beautiful. Of Turkish extraction, as it turned out. Delaney didn't even try to guess how young she was, lest mid-life male jealously overcame him. Her name was Zynep. She was a clothing designer. She was also Muslim and didn't drink alcohol, which made her a very strange partner for Ackermann indeed.
Ackermann liked to eat at Zur letzten Instanz because it was said to be the oldest restaurant in Berlin and because, he said, he was reputedly the oldest political editor in the city. It was located on two floors of a baroque building just outside the crumbling brick wall that once ringed medieval Berlin. Everyone from Napoleon to Beethoven to the illustrious Ackermann himself had eaten there, many times.
“Prisoners used to stop off here for a final beer before going to jail, my friends,” Ackermann said as they climbed a difficult circular staircase to a series of small rooms on the second floor. “I myself did so before both of my wedding days.”
The place was crammed with locals and tourists, extremely noisy but therefore a place where conversations could not be overheard. Zynep was a woman of few words, it turned out, although her English was quite good. She seemed content for the most part to watch the two old friends trade information and barbs throughout the evening.
She did say at the outset, however: “Gunter thinks you are an excellent journalist, Frank. He told me some very interesting stories about you. And about you and him together.”
Gunter had gone for what would be an increasingly frequent series of visits to the toilet.
“He is an excellent journalist himself,”
Delaney said.
“Are you working on an important story here in Berlin?” she asked.
“I'm never sure,” he said.
Delaney and Ackermann were able to talk at length as the evening progressed about Germany, Stasi, the Cold War, house fires, dead chiefs of police and next steps, without having to fill Zynep in. Much of what they discussed was general; when things became more specific they told the young designer that Delaney was planning an investigative piece.
“She's simply not interested in politics or journalism,” Ackermann told Delaney when Zynep herself had left the table. “That is a perfect situation. She likes design and clothes and making money with her little shop. She will not report us to aging Stasi stalwarts possibly lurking on the first floor of this very restaurant. Have no fear.”
Delaney found Ackermann's musings and reminiscences and outrage about the changes in Germany to be most useful. His knowledge of the country was encyclopedic and, as a card-carrying Marxist, he had taken a special interest in the Cold War era.
He seemed genuinely delighted at the fact that for many years, always, Stasi spies had completely outfoxed and outclassed West Germany's. The legendary East German spymaster Marcus Wolf had scattered his spies throughout West Germany, right into the highest echelonsâin the 1970s, right into President Willy Brandt's inner circle. Inside East Germany, informants and listening devices and hidden cameras were everywhere. There were reportedly far more informants and intelligence officers per capita in East Germany than anywhere else in the Communist world, including Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
So the fact that West Germany had had such a success with Klaus Heinrich, the fact that he had been able to insinuate himself deep into the East German intelligentsia and bureaucracy, was a muchneeded success story for those on the Western side of the Wall. The eventual propaganda value, not to mention the preceding years of intelligence value, provided by Heinrich could not be overstated.
“It was a fucking triumph for the Westies, Francis. Don't you see that? Can't you see how important a figure Herr Heinrich actually was?” Ackermann shouted as he attacked his giant plate of
schnitzel
and
spaetzle
and pork shank and red cabbage.
When the Wall came down and the GDR regime with it, and when the files began to be openedâthose that Stasi, in those final chaotic days had not managed to burn or bury or shredâit became even more abundantly clear just how outclassed the West Germans had been in the spying game. The files that survived showed the extraordinary extent of the infiltration of West Germany by Marcus Wolf's spies.
For more than ten years after reunification, as the “puzzle women” in an office in Nuremburg painstakingly put back together files from the bags of shredded paper found in GDR offices, and as other, unshredded, files came to light, the names of more spies and moles and informants surfaced as well. There were subsequent denunciations, resignations, even some high-profile espionage prosecutions. But always there was the possibility of even more embarrassment for the West.
In 1992, the surviving Stasi files had been declassified by a reunited Germany. In 2000, Washington returned another swathe of such files seized in 1989 by their own delighted operatives in the East as the Wall came down. That the CIA had carefully perused and copied these before their return was in no doubt. Postreunification, there were also persistent rumours that the infamous Rosewood file, said to contain even more high-level names of GDR spies, informants and sympathizers and even more potential embarrassment for the former West Germany, would be returned by the Americans at any time.
So Klaus Heinrich was a godsend for the West. If Klaus Heinrich did not exist, Ackermann said, he would have had to be invented.
Delaney, despite his increasing intoxication and the huge plates of old-fashioned Germanic peasant fare littering the tables, had managed to take notes for most of the evening. Zynep watched in amusement as this process became more and more laboured, and Delaney's notebook more and more stained with wine and
sauerbraten
sauce and beer.
“Shall I act as stenographer for a while, Frank?” she said.
“Never!” Ackermann roared. “A good journalist is always able to see to his own precious notebook. Never!”
As midnight approached, and the crowds in the restaurant began to thin, logic and memory were in short supply at Delaney's table. Only Zynep appeared to be thinking clearly and her interest in proceedings was peripheral.
“The autopsy report, Gunter,” Delaney said eventually. “We must have it.”
“Yours? You don't look so good.”
“Heinrich's, of course.” They didn't bother to explain any of this to Zynep. Ackermann looked suddenly alert, every so slightly sobered.
“An intriguing proposition, my dear Francis,” he said.
“Easily done, for a man of your skills and experience.”
“Exactly so. Obtaining such confidential medical and police documents is my specialty. As you know.”
“Thank goodness for that.”
“I shall have it for you within hours or days, my friend. We shall peruse it together. You may then call your editors on my satellite phone as we dodge bullets.” “Exactly.”
“And your job, my friend Francis Delaney, I have decided, is to now follow up your foolish theory about former BKA President Ulrich Mueller. Your incessant, how shall I say, your incessant references to this matter have piqued, if this is the correct English word, my interest.”
“I'm so pleased you see the wisdom of this,” Delaney said drunkenly.
“This prospect is also of interest to me because it would involve a visit by yourself to Mareike Fischer, a lovely young undercover drugs officer employed by Berlin's esteemed Landeskriminalamt police. The lovely Mareike is Herr Mueller's niece, perhaps his only surviving relative, or so they say. His poor departed sister's little girl. Now a member of the Berlin drugs squad. Police work runs in that family, clearly. However, the police niece in question is, if I may say, one of the loveliest undercover drugs officers in the LKA or even in all of Germandom. She is also said to be a nymphomaniac. My apologies for this characterization, Zynep. I know this only from secondary sources, of course. I know her only slightly and professionally. I know her by reputation, one might say.”
Zynep was still able to smile after a long evening of watching two journalists get drunk.
“This sounds intriguing,” Delaney said. “It has taken you all night to tell me about this part of the plan.”
“It has taken you all night to convince me it is an angle worth pursuing.” “It's the beer. It must be.”
“As Chief Political Editor of
Die Welt
, I hereby assign you to meet with this young police officer and ask her straight out why her Uncle Ulrich resigned just before retirement, minutes before retirement. The fact that you have intrigued me with such questions tonight, Francis, does not mean however that I think Mareike Fischer's answer will lead us anywhere in the Klaus Heinrich matter. It will, perhaps however, stop you from harassing me about this angle any further. And it may well get you laid. Something I highly recommend to visitors while in Berlin. Where is my mobile phone? I shall call her immediately to set up an appointment with the world-famous Delaney. She is probably out consorting with biker gangs and drug dealers as we speak. She loves her work. She loves it so much she forgets who she really is sometimes, or so I am told.”
“An excellent plan, Gunter.”
“Which part of it exactly?” Delaney smiled at Zynep, instead of answering. Ackermann's chin had suddenly sagged toward his chest. A barely audible snore escaped his lips.
“Time to move the
Die Welt
political desk out of here, Zynep,” Delaney said. “Some heavy lifting involved. I'll help you.”
“Thank you, Frank,” Zynep said, still, apparently, neither bored nor angry.
By the end of a very long evening, therefore, they all had their assignments. Ackermann, among other things, to obtain the Heinrich autopsy reportâno easy task. Delaney to seek out Mueller's niece, a task that Ackermann apparently still dismissed as a useless waste of time except for the possibility of gratuitous sex. Zynep to get the very large and unwieldy
Die Welt
editor into a taxi and safely home in his extremely intoxicated state.
Another cream-coloured Mercedes taxi let Delaney off at the entrance to the InterContinental. He had had to endure no anti-Turkish diatribes on the way back from the restaurant, however. His driver this time was content simply to drive silently through the rain-slicked streets of Berlin and listen to waltzes on the car radio.
A hotel doorman in a black raincoat came out from under the glass pyramid, proffering a large umbrella. Delaney suddenly decided that he was too drunk and too full of conspiracy theories to go immediately up to his room. He took the umbrella and told the doorman he would walk for a while instead.
“Take great care,” the doorman said, clearly disapproving of such a plan. “It is night. Avoid walking by the zoo.”
Delaney walked the other way down Budapester Strasse, in the direction of the Reichstag. He hoped the walking time would allow him to begin to sort out what he had gathered from a night full of talk. The cold spring rain might also sober him up.
He could understand why Germans, and Europeans in generalâwhether pedophiles or notâ flocked to the sunny beaches of Thailand in their thousands. In March, Berlin was damp, chilly, grey. The contrast with the bougainvillea-scented humidity and the blue-yellow heat of Thailand could not be more complete. Delaney thought of the scene 9,000 kilometres away at the Metropole Hotel in Phuket, where the night-time doormen would be dressed in short-sleeved shirts and sandals, wiping sweat from their brows, not cold northern rain.
Eventually, more or less consciously, Delaney came into Potsdamer Platz, the very centre of the new Berlin and, some would say, the heart of the new Europe. Delaney had been there many times, before and after Berlin was a divided city, and it was as emblematic now as it was then.
Before 1989, Potsdamer Platz was a Cold War wasteland, bisected by the Wall, doomed to a heavy political fate. Abandoned tramlines wound across it to abruptly meet the cold graffiti-covered concrete that split Berlin. Weeds grew from cracks in what was one of the last undeveloped major open spaces in a major European city. Bombed-out buildings from the Second World War had been bulldozed so as to give East German border guards a clear line of fire in case anyone was foolish enough to choose this desolate point from which to make a bid for freedom.
The Cold War symbolism continued deep underground. The S-Bahn trainline remained open, briefly passing under East German territory on the way from one part of West Berlin to another. Potsdamer Platz became the best known of the socalled S-Bahn “ghost stations,” sealed off from the outside world and patrolled by armed guards. Trains raced straight through, never stopping.
Now, all was transformed. From a symbol of Cold War nothingness, Potsdamer Platz had become a boom city's beating heart. The real estate, now breathtakingly valuable, had been divvied up fast in the years post-1989. The world's corporate and industrial titans had competed for attention with grandiose building projects. Delaney stood, as he always did on such visits, marvelling at and dwarfed by the excesses of the Sony Center and the towering Daimler-Benz headquarters. Rock music thumped in a dozen stylish bars. Tourists and locals jostled in and out of shops and cineplexes.