The Berlin Assignment (59 page)

The number of researchers in the labyrinth had increased and he joined the busy seekers. Their mammoth task was to identify every informant, each double agent, all the hundreds of thousands of Stasi collaborators in the GDR. To warm up for his own exploration, Hanbury retraced the steps he took with Stobbe months before. He poked around the various index rooms, F16, F17, F22, F77, F78, and wandered through the caverns with the neatly ordered rows of files. Then he got down to business.

In F16, the master index with its sly, phonetic approach to ordering six million names, he looked for himself first. Nothing had changed. He was there, forever slotted in between Bruno Hähn and Wilhelm Hähne. What wrong had they committed? Maybe having been overheard listening to pop songs on West Berlin radio? Hanbury would never know. He was there to research other personae. Schwartz had provided him with half a dozen cards, each with a name neatly printed in the top left hand corner:
Grassinger
, Alwin P;
Richter
, Johann Georg;
Winterstein
, Reinhardt:
Böckel
, Julius Arthur;
Reuss
, Ernst Wilhelm;
Woltmann
, Karl.

That first time in F16, Hanbury searched them out. He found three and transcribed details from the index onto Schwartz's cards. Winterstein was the easiest. Grassinger was more difficult because he had been filed with only one s. Eventually Hanbury came up with Woltmann too, at least he believed he did, if a Karl amongst the Wohltmanns was the right one. With Richter, Böckel and Reuss he had no luck.

Later, in
Das Klecksel
, Hanbury pulled out the meagre harvest. Schwartz took the cards eagerly. “I'm surprised these three drew a blank,” he said. For some reason he believed all six would have Stasi records.

“I ran out of time. They might be there, but the filing is bizarre. Look
at Grassinger and Woltmann.” Hanbury pointed at the arbitrary changes.

Schwartz thought about this and added other possible names to the three cards. To Böckel, he added Bokel, Bockal and Böcal. Similar variations were put on the cards of Richter and Reuss. They turned to the three names Hanbury located. “What are those numbers?” Schwartz asked.

“They tell you where to look in F22, the procedures index. No names there, only numbers. For example, my F22 card shows my file can be located using the foreign enemy index, F17.”

“Can you tell anything from these F22 notations?”

“No, except that two are in the F47 index and one is F56. Next time in I'll take a look.”

Schwartz then handed Hanbury twelve more cards with names.

Hanbury checked each one out. With practice it went faster and Schwartz passed him more cards, so that by the time his Berlin vacation began he was working on more than fifty names. One by one he traced them deep into the files. Some names, after complicated cross-references had been tracked down, pointed to a file location called
DDB
. Hanbury eventually located a small room in a remote corner of the complex with a card thumb-tacked to the door showing these three letters. The files in
DDB
were meagre compilations, a few sheets of notations that were very difficult to decipher. The information seemed meaningless to him. But once Hanbury had jotted it down and brought it out, Schwartz was excited. “Fascinating,” he muttered. “Rich material. More research in that area will be essential. See this…” He pointed at a word.

“Tristan,” said Hanbury.

“Remember two days ago? Isolde? And the file on Karel Neumann mentioned a Parsival, also with a reference to
DDB
. We'll keep looking for references like that. Some kind of group existed with cover names borrowed from Wagner.”

“A special class of informants?”

“Possibly. Possibly something else. And there's another category that's fascinating. Leopard, Grizzly, Scorpion. Dangerous creatures. Are they connected? And these others – Herald, Incubus, Charlemagne. There must be information on them somewhere. If only we could find a way to match cover names with real ones.”

“I could try tracing them in reverse. References to cover names always come at the end of searches through the substantive files. Suppose I start with the cover names index tomorrow and see where trails go then?” Schwartz agreed and prepared a fresh pile of cards, this time with cover names in the upper left hand corner.

Thus began the productive final two days. Thursday morning, promptly at 8:30, in F77 – the index to the cover names – Hanbury searched out Dragon, King of Fear, Black Queen, Cactus, Spear, Minuteman, Saturn, Chairman, Northern Lights, Poison and so on and so forth. The index pointed to many file locations. Not infrequently, there was a link to F47, the Stasi control officer index. Going into F47 through this back door provided still more trails, which took him into parts of the complex he had not visited before.

The summer weather that evening was at its finest when the professor and the consul met in the
Klecksel
garden under an enormous oak. As daylight faded, small oil lamps on the tables flickered in the darkness; the tree above was an impenetrable dome. Schwartz picked slowly through the latest cards. Remarkable, he kept muttering. Remarkable. “Last day tomorrow,” he said. “Concentrate on
DDB
. We're near a breakthrough.”

Hanbury spent the final day in the small back room looking for answers to Schwartz's questions. On Friday night a rich pile of cards, each one covered with precise notations, lay before Schwartz on the
Klecksel
garden table. The professor was calm, but it was a forced calm. The day's
haul excited him as none before had. “
Jawohl
,” he said several times. “Yes. Indeed yes. This fits.” A few cards later, he sucked in his breath. “A surprise. Truly a surprise.”

“After yesterday and today, I'm no longer so sure all this is purely Nazi war criminal material,” Hanbury broke in.

“What makes you say that?” Schwartz asked carefully. He continued studying the cards. “If not Nazis, then what? What's your guess?”

“Most of the information you're looking at has an F47 connection. At first, I assumed these people were Stasi agents since we knew they were not Stasi targets. But taking the names back to the main index, F16, and from there to F22, they didn't lead me back to F47 as should have happened had they been agents. Many led to F59 instead. That's the index on economic operations. So, these people are neither targets, nor agents, nor informants. They're a different class. These were people who cooperated with the Stasi in other ways. If you take for example the economic sector's cover names, Panther, Leopard, Stinger and the others, and check them out through F77, the cover name index, the file numbers you get there are different again. It's not a circle. These cover names take you in all kinds of directions, except most of the time there's the
DDB
hint. And when I went after those hints in
DDB
, as you can see here and here too, you get German names, foreign names and cover names, plus a recurrence of the acronym,
BKK
. What's
BKK
? Financial information is often associated with it, sometimes in DM, often US dollars. So I doubt it has anything to do with the Nazis.
BKK
seems like a commercial entity, maybe engaged in weapons sales, or something like that.” Hanbury was pointing at words and numbers on the cards. “Furthermore, these others – Joker, King of Fear, Superman – these individuals are not that old, not old enough to have been active Nazis. Interestingly, they travelled to international conferences. These scribbles seem to be shorthand reports on meetings with personae who carried
cover names based on ancient philosophers – Democritus, Epicurus, Socrates, Aristotle. What might those meetings have been about? Philosophy? I doubt it. What would the King of Fear have in common with Socrates? Mind-expanding drugs? And this is an interesting grouping too. Shakespeare, Titian, Paganini. People buying or selling art?”

“What about linking cover names with real names?” asked Schwartz. “What would you say about that?”

“There's nothing direct, but I'm pretty sure Leopard was, or is, someone called Hans-Detlef Weisshagel. They appear in similar contexts several times. He in turn was closely associated with Reusch, who you thought at the start was Reuss. Joker seems almost certainly to have been a certain Burkhard Wegener…”

“Go on.”

Hanbury flipped through more cards, linking cover names and their activities with names of persons. Schwartz took all this down. “And this is based on
DDB
files?” he asked again, to be certain. “It's all
DDB
. That's where real names and cover names become nearly directly linked. Most of the documents have a reference to
BKK
. What does it mean?”

“
BKK
stands for
Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung
,” Schwartz said. “It was a wing of the Stasi that bought and sold goods on world markets, sometimes illicitly.” He said this as if it were widely known. “Fine work, Tony. It goes without saying there's a good report in this for you and a monograph or two for me. A productive week.” Schwartz rifled through the cards with his thumb.

Reports! Hanbury thought about slaving over yet another one. It gave him no enthusiasm. His life had been ruled by reports. Admittedly, they had caused a stir. Krauthilda had phoned to say her last act as a Zealot was to let him know a rumour was circulating that the high priest wanted the Berlin reports used as a model. “You should also know,” she had announced, “that Krauthilda is history. Starting Monday I'm first political
secretary in Rome. I hope I get on with Italians as well as you do with Germans.”

And now, under the
Klecksel
oak, recalling the phone call, Hanbury shook his head. What report with what kind of theme would do justice to the information he had lifted out of that strange
DDB
room? Who could possibly be interested? In his last report he had explored the skinhead phenomenon. Schwartz had labelled them directionless creatures lacking a spiritual framework, but possessing enormous reservoirs of energy. Would the Stasi's Scorpions, Stingers, Jokers, Supermen, whoever they were, be treated by Schwartz in a similar way? Misfits with unused potential? Hanbury was curious. “What monographs?” he asked. “What would you write about? What do you think all this information means?”

The professor studied the consul. “It's too early to say,” he said. “It's good to know what's in the
DDB
room, but I'll need outside corroboration to see what it adds up to.”

“Tell me, this
DDB
crowd, are they a sociological phenomenon like the skinheads?”

“I'll know more in a few weeks,” Schwartz replied evasively. “I doubt direct comparisons can be made. What makes you ask?”

“The last report we did on the neo-Nazi movement. You suggested the members were in search of spiritual roots. Remember, you said if they were handled properly they could make a contribution. I'm wondering whether the
DDB
crowd is like that, whether they have that potential. My impression is they're more likely to be criminals.”

“Some of them may be,” the professor said.

Hanbury laughed. “That would be quite a monograph, sketching out a spiritual rationale for the
DDB
crowd of criminals. You know, I've seen skinheads hanging out around railway stations begging for coins. They're not great advertising. I personally think it would be a hard row making them productive.” He made more light jokes about the thin
parallel between Stasi-linked criminals and neo-Nazi rowdies. “If the former deserve no respect, then why the optimism about the potential of the latter?” he asked.

“You haven't seen them in their element,” said Schwartz. He looked at the consul for a long time, seemingly making a decision. “It's Friday evening,” he taunted. “Are you free? Shall I show you something?”

Hanbury shrugged. “Why not? I'm on vacation.”

The destination, Hanbury learned, was Potsdam. In Schwartz's car he asked what was there. “I'm doing something I normally wouldn't,” Schwartz replied, refusing to say more. The route took them through Wannsee. The sinking sun had set the sailboats out on the water ablaze and in the light the lake's surface was a sheet of platinum. Crossing the Glienicker Bridge into Potsdam, the professor joked about the brisk East-West trade in spies once staged there. “Of course, only the important ones came through here,” he added. “The small fry were swapped on the S-bahn.” On the Potsdam side the road was rough and Schwartz reduced speed. The houses were monstrously run down. Always into a different world, wherever, whenever a crossing into the East is made. The Russians, he remarked, reduced Potsdam to crumbling outer shells. The professor knew his way here. At Cecilienhof he turned right, to the river, and then left on a track that took them into a forest. The sun's final rays of the day came in below the crowns of trees. Schwartz said he loved this sylvan way –
Ich liebe diesen Holzweg
– adding that it provided a sense of nearness to the stirring Germanic feat 2000 years ago of vanquishing the Roman legions in forest warfare and driving them back to the other side of the Rhine. The path continued over little rises and around massive trees. Here and there the wood thickened into a tangle of luxuriant creeping green, then opened into stands of beeches, or groves of
massive oaks with gnarled boughs reaching out. “It seems untouched for centuries,” said Hanbury, inspired by the peace and the smell of rich, dark humus. He was ever more intrigued about their final destination. “A place to feel religion,” Schwartz confirmed.

They came to a clearing. On one side ran a stockade and behind it stood a fading sandstone building, the remains of an old
Waldschloss
, an aristocrat's forest hideaway. The stone was discoloured with lichen and decorative elements were breaking off. Vines crept up the sides and pushed through the roof. Nature doing its reclaiming. But the stockade was recent, and newer still were black pig heads stuck on pointed poles next to the entrance. Eyes had been gouged out; flies clustered in the cavities. “How welcoming,” said Hanbury. He viewed the pig heads with suspicion.