The taxi dropped Harry in Judenstraße in the old Spandau area in the west side of the British sector. A handful of pedestrians were out doing their weekend shopping and there was light traffic on a street that bustled with all manner of small shops, restaurants and coffee bars.
He found the coffee shop he was looking for and, alongside it, the red door with two buttons fixed to a panel on the wall. He pressed one labelled “Richter, J.” and stood back, casting an eye in both directions as he waited. The intercom crackled.
“Richter.”
Harry stepped forward and spoke into the grille. “Morgen, Johannes, it’s Bertie. Fancy a coffee?”
“One minute,” came the reply. Harry stared at the peephole in the centre of the door. After a few seconds he heard footsteps from the inside and caught movement through the lens. He lifted his ID card up and held it still. He heard a key turn in a lock and the door opened revealing a heavy-set, unshaven guy in a crumpled grey suit and loosened tie, the cut of the jacket barely concealing the bulge inside the left shoulder. The man stepped back and let Harry pass into a dimly lit corridor with another door on the left and a staircase straight ahead.
“Morning, Frank.”
“All right, Harry?” Frank Boyd made no attempt to conceal his boredom.
“How’s the babysitting?”
“Getting a bit stressed.”
“He’s only been here twenty-four hours.”
“I think he expected the red-carpet treatment. A dingy flat up a back passage is not what he’s used to, I guess.”
“I’ll put him straight.”
“Better still, get him some proper digs, then me and Nigel can get back to our day jobs.”
It was typical Frank. It was probably not very interesting sitting around a flat all day and night trying to ignore the rants of a truculent guest, but then whatever Frank did, he found cause to moan. Harry winked and patted his friend’s extensive gut.
“You could do with a bit of exercise, me old mate. Too much strudel.”
“Not much else to do.”
“I expect we’ll have him off your hands in a day or two, if we don’t ship him back to where he came from.”
Frank led the way up the stairs and turned onto a small landing with a single door. He stood in front of a tiny lens and tapped rhythmically on the door – a preconceived sequence. The door opened and Nigel Dennis let them in. He was in shirtsleeves, leather shoulder holster and Beretta in full view. Each man tilted a head in silent greeting.
Harry stepped into a large sitting room, lit dimly by the glow of table lamps and wall lights. Curtains were drawn across the only window, a crack at the top allowing a sliver of sunlight to project onto the heavy brown patterned wallpaper on one wall. A small kitchenette was arranged in one corner with sink, kettle and coffee pot on a two-ring electric hob. Two sofas faced each other across a coffee table beside a dormant electric fire.
A sole figure sat at a table in one corner under a standard lamp, flicking a newspaper with his left hand, his right encased in a plaster cast. He glanced over at Harry.
“Sir?” Nigel was looking at Harry dispassionately.
Harry opened his jacket and raised his arms. Nigel frisked him from top to toe. “Thank you, sir.”
“We’ll go into the cooler.”
Harry approached the seated figure, who’d now returned his full attention to the newspaper. All part of the game. He waited until Bergmann could no longer stand the silence.
“Who are you?”
“Shall we go somewhere private?” Harry gestured towards a doorway and after a second or two, Bergmann made a tired show of closing and folding the newspaper and got to his feet. He was wearing a black polo-neck sweater over grey tracksuit bottoms and black sneakers, all presumably borrowed from the MPs. He had three-day stubble and his hair was unkempt, but apart from the plaster cast on his arm, appeared to be in reasonable health.
Nigel led them through the doorway and down a short corridor with two further doors. The walls were papered in thick stripes, vertical wooden battens fixed at three-foot intervals creating a panelled effect. He stopped halfway and turned to face a section of wall where a cheap landscape painting hung above a heavy steel radiator. He put both hands on the radiator and tugged and, with a loud click, a section of the wall between two battens together with the radiator swung outwards.
He felt around inside and turned on fluorescent strip lights that blinked into life, revealing a room that was bare apart from a large table and four chairs. The table bore a water jug with two glasses, a notepad and pencil, a compact reel-to-reel tape recorder and small TV screen. All four walls were covered in a padded and quilted brown fabric that extended to a door on the opposite wall. The room was comfortably cool compared to the stuffy atmosphere of the apartment.
“Please, take a seat,” he said to Bergmann.
“Just buzz when you’re done, sir.”
Harry nodded as Nigel left, pushing the radiator-door to behind him.
“What’s with the sound-proofing? Is this where you carry out your torture and beatings?” Bergmann sat back in his chair and put his good hand in his pocket. Harry sat down opposite, smiled pleasantly and extended a hand across the table.
“Harry Male, Major.”
Bergmann looked at the outstretched hand for a moment, then took it without expression. “Klaus Bergmann.”
Harry flicked a switch on the TV and after a second a fuzzy black and white image appeared showing Nigel moving around the sitting room.
“Do you mind?” Harry pointed at the tape recorder.
“Do I have a choice?”
“You’re not a prisoner here, Mr Bergmann. You can leave whenever you want.” Harry detected a flicker of a smile across Bergmann’s face. “It’s just easier than taking notes.” Bergmann nodded.
“Nice to have a name. Your friends out there are not very communicative.”
“They don’t need to know who you are and you don’t need to know them.”
“But their job is to protect me, is it not?”
“A precaution only, until we establish whether you’re at risk.”
“Or whether you are.”
“Indeed.”
Harry pressed a button on the tape recorder and the reels started to spin slowly. He kept both eyes on Bergmann, sensing the man’s initial truculence was beginning to wane.
“First interview with Mr Klaus Bergmann conducted by Major Harry Male at” – he looked at his watch – “eleven thirty-four on Saturday the fourteenth of August nineteen sixty-two. Safe house zero five, location classified, West Berlin.” Bergmann fidgeted in his chair and then sat forward, suddenly looking less sure of himself. “Can you please confirm your full name, nationality and occupation?”
Bergmann cleared his throat. “Klaus Friedrich Bergmann. I am a citizen of the German Democratic Republic and I am, er, was, personal assistant to Dr Gustav Klein at the Ministry of Culture.”
“Dr Klein is a member of the politburo?”
“No, he is, shall we say, one level below.”
Harry already knew the answer. It was just a simple test to see if Bergmann was prone to embellishment or felt the need to aggrandise his position. Harry fished his cigarettes out of his pocket and proffered the open end of the box to Bergmann who shook his head. “I don’t smoke.”
Harry nodded and reluctantly put them back in his pocket. “Neither do I. Do you have any family?”
Bergmann’s eyes dropped. It was the reaction he wanted.
“I have a wife and two children.”
“How old?”
“Five and three.”
“May I ask their names?”
Bergmann hesitated as if searching for the answer, but Harry could tell he was composing himself. He cleared his throat.
“Claudia, my wife, Thomas and Sabine.”
“And where are they now?”
“Prague, visiting her sister.”
“Did she know you were going to defect?”
“Yes.”
“Are they safe?” Harry knew Bergmann could have had no contact and couldn’t therefore be certain. It was cruel, but a necessary test to see if he was human. Bergmann would have to be a good liar if it wasn’t uppermost in his mind. His eyes went moist.
“I think so. I hope you can help me.”
Harry studied the dishevelled young man in front of him. His initial self-assurance and defiance had crumbled at the first mention of his family and he seemed to shrink visibly in his seat, shoulders drooping and head down. The body language of submission and self-doubt. He offered him a crumb.
“Let me have some details later and I’ll make sure the right people know.”
“You have people in Prague?” It sounded natural, an innocent expression of hope, a glimmer of optimism in a situation he couldn’t control, something Harry the human being would like to encourage. Harry the professional overruled it and ignored the question.
“Why did you defect?”
Bergmann shrugged. “Freedom?”
Harry let out a sigh. Another deluded soul.
“What makes you think you’re going to be any freer in the West?”
“You don’t know what it’s like.”
“No. But depending on how much of an embarrassment you are to your bosses and how upset they are at your betrayal, you and your family may spend the rest of your lives in hiding, looking over your shoulder. That your idea of freedom?”
“It’s a price I am prepared to pay.”
“And if we are going to help you, you’ll have to help us.”
“Of course. I brought you the film.”
“The film is worthless.” Harry hoped that was untrue but he needed to establish whether Bergmann had a conscience or was just a mercenary. His look of angry surprise confirmed neither.
“But it clearly shows a war crime, committed by a senior government official. A member of the politburo of the DDR!” He prodded his index finger on the table for emphasis.
“Is that why you risked your life and your family? To bring a war criminal to justice?” He was trying to wind Bergmann up and it was working as his eyes narrowed, a vain attempt at stifling his rising anger. Before he could reply, Harry decided to push a bit harder. He wanted to gauge where Bergmann’s sympathies really lay if they weren’t with the communists any more.
“You were in the Hitler Youth, weren’t you?”
Bergmann blinked. “What do you mean?”
“You wore the brown shirt and the corduroy shorts and the armband and you raised your right arm like all the others.”
“We had no choice!”
“And you knew what was being done in the name of the German people.”
“No, of course we didn’t!” The rising pitch of Bergmann’s voice betrayed a mixture of anger, frustration and fear.
“Or did you just turn a blind eye to what Charlie Chaplin was doing because he made you feel good about yourself?”
“I had no idea. I was too young to understand, but Germany had spent so many years in the gutter no one cared why we became so powerful so quickly. They had no desire or incentive to question.”
“The ends justify the means.” Harry made it sound offhand to see if Bergmann would take the bait and his colour indicated the screws were tightening.
“I was only a boy. I am not a criminal!”
“You just work for them.”
“My family died at Dresden!” spat Bergmann, pointing at a wall he presumably thought faced east. “They were among the two hundred thousand people murdered by your bombs. Where is the criminal who gave that order?”
Harry’s first instinct was retaliation. His mother had died in Coventry at the hands of the Luftwaffe so he was not in the mood to be lectured. But he didn’t answer questions; he asked them. In any event, he had no need nor any desire to debate anything, especially not with an ex-Nazi turned commie sympathiser, even if he was beginning to like him. As to the man’s veracity, he had still to make up his mind.
Bergmann went on. “Unlike you, Major Male, I am not partisan when it comes to what is a war crime and what is not a war crime.”
Harry kept his expression neutral and impassive, determined to let nothing rile him. Something else he was good at. The number of civilians killed at Dresden had been widely disputed but by any measure they had run to the tens of thousands, so in terms of innocents killed, whatever was on the film paled into insignificance compared to the levelling of Dresden. But it had been said the crime lay in the intent, the purpose. Innocent lives to save innocent lives as opposed to wilful aggression and gratuitous extermination. The ends justify the means. Either way, if Bergmann’s primary motivation had been to bring a criminal to justice, why would he seek justice from those he believed had committed even worse crimes, crimes in which he had a personal interest? He would have to explain.
“So you went from Hitler Youth to Bolshevik apparatchik.”
Bergmann shook his head and gave a wry smile at Harry’s apparent insouciance. His voice turned sober and measured. “We were all at the mercy of the Russians. I was an orphan – used as slave labour to clear up the mess made by the warmongers. We did whatever we had to do to survive.”
“And you survived by climbing your way up the greasy pole in the party machine all the while thinking, One day, I’m going to wander over and say hello to those good people who murdered my family?”
“Not all the while. For many years I swallowed the lie: believed the propaganda, bought into the socialist ideal of a classless society owned by and governed by the proletariat. But I began to see the corruption, the hypocrisy, the inequality and I could smell the stench of evil. It was no place to bring up my children.”
“But you benefited from the corruption and the inequality, did you not? Nice apartment, good salary, private car, all the perks of the ruling elite? Dacha in the country, perhaps?”
“And I gave it all up. I risked my life, so that my family would be free, so my children would not be slaves of the state. Is that not what you promise in the ‘free world’, Major Male?”
Harry let the silence hang for a moment. He didn’t answer questions.
“How did you get the film?”
“It was handed in by a woman clearing her father’s loft after he died. He was an amateur photographer and had taken many reels of film, mostly family but some taken during the war.”
“Did she know what it contained?”
“No, she just wanted rid of it. Thought it may be of interest to the Culture Ministry.”
“And you identified the officer in charge?”
“Yes. I took it to Klein and he said he’d deal with it.”
“And?”
Bergmann shrugged. “Nothing happened. I should have known. Klein tried to use it to further his own career, threaten exposure, demand promotion in return for his silence.”
“So what did you do?”
“I was naïve. I argued with him and he threatened me and my family.”
“So your career was over anyway?”
“There is no such thing as a whistle-blower in the DDR.”
“But you had no choice but to leave. You said you wanted justice and freedom, but all you really wanted was to save your own skin.”
Bergmann dropped his head. “I want all of those things. For my family.”
Harry was beginning to form a picture of the sad and lonely Klaus Bergmann, on a mission to save the world but instead destroying himself in the process. Would anything different have happened here? He couldn’t say. But he’d been told in no uncertain terms he should forget about the contents of the film. It was classified and would remain so until people far more important than him decided otherwise.
The silent TV screen in front of him drew his attention. Nigel had walked out of shot earlier and a static image of the sofas had been all that remained for a while. But now there was movement. Nigel stepped into view and fell backwards onto the floor. It was vaguely comical as he struggled to get up but was then thrown back by an invisible force. Harry frowned and watched, incredulous, as a pair of legs appeared and straddled the motionless body. A hand holding a gun swung upwards, pointing at the head, two soundless jerky movements leaving no doubt.
Harry leapt from his chair, knocking it over, and raced for the door internal door.
“Out!” he shouted at Bergmann, pointing to the door opposite. He pulled down a thick metal bar from the side of the door to rest horizontally on a latch, preventing it being opened from the other side. Bergmann hadn’t moved. He was frozen in shock.
“What is happening?”
“Move! Now!”
Harry grabbed Bergmann’s arm and hauled him out of his seat, dragging him to the door opposite. He fumbled with a latch and two bolts then heard a commotion behind him as the radiator door rattled and shook on its hinges before it was punctured by four holes of light, two, three and four accompanied by the popping sound of a silencer. The external door swung outwards onto a spiral staircase and he pushed Bergmann out into the warm sunshine.
“Move!” he shouted again, but Bergmann’s brain had finally caught up and he needed no encouragement. They flung themselves down the narrow metal fire escape two steps at a time, descending thirty feet to the back yard, then raced down the path to a fence and gate that separated it from a side road. Harry looked left and right, judging the distance to the main road. He chose left.
“This way! Run!”
Bergmann was ten years younger and despite his broken arm put on a turn of speed that left Harry, hampered by a sudden resurgence of pain in his right leg, struggling to keep up. Bergmann reached the main road in thirty seconds and stopped, waiting for Harry to catch up. His leg ached and he gasped for breath, lungs burning, a legacy of years of smoking.
“Where to?”
“Right. Look for a taxi!”
They set off, Bergmann taking the lead again. Within fifty yards he saw a cab coming the other way and waved. It turned in the middle of the road and stopped by the pavement. They threw themselves in the back.
“Reichstag building. Hurry!”
***
Schneider stepped over the body of Frank Boyd in the hallway and exited the safe house the way he came in, by the front door. He wanted to hurry – he knew he’d have to be quick if he were not to lose his target – but it might attract attention. He looked left and right. He had a fifty-fifty chance.
He went right, walking briskly and then broke into a shuffling run towards the main road. He reached the corner and looked right, seeing two men running away a hundred metres distant then watched as they flagged down a taxi. He was lucky: another pulled up beside him. He wrenched open the back door and dragged a bewildered old man out of the back, throwing him onto the pavement.
“Fahren Sie los! Schnell!” he shouted from the back seat, ordering the shocked driver to get going, but the man hesitated and began to protest. Schneider had no time. He put the gun to his neck. “Schnell!”