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He sometimes thought he could come in from the office of an evening and say, “Today I popped down to Bonn and shot Chancellor Kohl,” and she would still say, “Oh, that’s nice.”
She eventually prepared him a meal. It was uneatable, so he did not eat it.
“I’m going out for a drink,” he said. She took another chocolate, offered one to Lutz, and they both went on watching television.
He got drunk that night. Drinking alone. He noticed that his hands were shaking and that he kept breaking out in sweat. He thought he had a summer cold coming on. Or the flu. He was not a psychiatrist, and there was none available to him. So no one told him he was heading for a complete nervous breakdown.
That Saturday, Major Vanavskaya arrived at Berlin-Schönefeld and was driven in an unmarked car to KGB headquarters, East Berlin. She checked at once on the whereabouts of the man she was stalking. He was in Cottbus, heading for Dresden, surrounded by army men, moving in a military convoy and out of her reach. On Sunday he would reach Karl-Marx-Stadt, Monday Zwickau, and Tuesday Jena. Her surveillance mandate did not cover East Germany. It could be extended, but that would require paperwork. Always the damned paperwork, she thought angrily.
The following day, Sam McCready arrived back in Germany and spent the morning conferring with the head of Bonn Station. In the evening he took delivery of the BMW car and the paperwork and drove to Cologne. He lodged at the Holiday Inn out at the airport, where he took and prepaid a room for two nights.
Before dawn on Monday, Bruno Morenz rose, long before his family, and left quietly. He arrived at the Holiday Inn about seven on that bright, early September morning and joined McCready in his room. The Englishman ordered breakfast for both from room service, and when the waiter had gone, he spread out a huge motoring map of Germany, West and East.
“We’ll do the route first,” he said. “Tomorrow morning you leave here at four A.M. It’s a long drive, so take it easy, in stages. Take the E35 here past Bonn, Limburg, and Frankfurt. It links to the E41 and E45, past Würzburg and Nuremburg. North of Nuremburg, pull left on the E51 past Bayreuth and up to the border. That’s your crossing point, near Hof. The Saale Bridge border station. It’s no more than a six-hour drive. You want to be there about eleven. I’ll be there ahead of you, watching from cover. Are you feeling all right?”
Morenz was sweating, even with his jacket off.
“It’s hot in here,” he said. McCready turned up the air conditioning.
“After the border, drive straight north to the Hermsdorfer Kreuz. Turn left onto the E40 heading back toward the West. At Mellingen, leave the Autobahn and head into Weimar. Inside the town, find Highway Seven and head west again. Four miles west of the town, on the right of the road, is a lay-by.”
McCready produced a large blown-up photograph of that section of the road, taken from a high-flying aircraft, but at an angle, for the aircraft had been inside Bavarian airspace. Morenz could see the small lay-by—some cottages, even the trees that shaded the patch of gravel designated as his first rendezvous. Carefully and meticulously, McCready ran him through the procedure he should follow and, if the first pass aborted, how and where he should spend the night and where and when to attend the second, backup rendezvous with Pankratin. At midmorning they broke for coffee.
At nine that morning, Frau Popovic arrived for work at the apartment in Hahnwald. She was the cleaning lady, a Yugoslav immigrant worker who came every day from nine until eleven. She had her own keys to the front door and the apartment door. She knew Fräulein Heimendorf liked to sleep late, so she always let herself in and started with the rooms other than the bedroom so that her employer could rise at half-past ten. Then she would tidy the lady’s bedroom. The locked room at the end of the passage, she never entered. She had been told—and had accepted—that it was a small room used for storing furniture. She had no idea what her employer did for a living.
That morning, she started with the kitchen, then did the hall and the passage. She was vacuum-cleaning the passage right up to the door at the end when she noticed what she thought was a brown silk slip lying on the floor at the base of the locked door. She tried to pick it up, but it was not a silk slip. It was a large brown stain, quite dry and hard, that seemed to have come from under the door. She tut-tutted at the extra work she would have to scrub it off, then went to get a bucket of water and a brush. She was working on her hands and knees when she kicked the door. To her surprise it moved. She tried the handle and found it was not locked.
The stain was still resisting her attempts to scrub it off, and she thought it might happen again, so she opened the door to see what might be leaking. Seconds later, she was running screaming down the stairs to hammer at the door of the ground-floor apartment and arouse the bewildered retired bookseller who lived there. He did not go upstairs, but he did call the 110 emergency number and ask for the police.
The call was logged in the Police Präsidium on the Waidmarkt at 9:51. The first to arrive, according to the unvarying routine of all German police forces, was a Streifenwagen, or patrol car, with two uniformed policemen. Their job was to establish whether an offense had indeed been committed, into which category it fell, and then to alert the appropriate departments. One of the men stayed downstairs with Frau Popovic, who was being comforted by the bookseller’s elderly wife, and the other went up. He touched nothing, just went down the passage and looked through the half-open door, gave a whistle of amazement, and came back down to use the bookseller’s phone. He did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that this one was for Homicide.
According to procedure, he first called the emergency doctor—in Germany, always supplied by the fire brigade. Then he called the Police Präsidium and asked for the Leitstelle, the Violent Crime switchboard. He told the operator where he was and what he had found and asked for two more uniformed men. The message went up to the Mordkommission or Murder Squad, always known as “First K” on the tenth and eleventh floors of the ugly, functional, green-concrete building covering all of one side of the Waidmarkt square. The Director of First K assigned a commissar and two assistants. Records showed later that they arrived at the Hahnwald apartment at 10:40 A.M., just as the doctor was leaving.
He had taken a closer look than the uniformed officer, felt for signs of life, touched nothing else, and left to make his formal report. The commissar, whose name was Peter Schiller, met him on the steps. Schiller knew him.
“What have we got?” he asked. It was not the doctor’s job to do a post-mortem, simply to establish the fact of death.
“Two bodies. One male, one female. One clothed, one naked.”
“Cause of death?” asked Schiller.
“Gunshot wounds, I’d say. The paramedic will tell you.”
“Time?”
“I’m not the pathologist. Oh, one to three days, I would say. Rigor mortis is well established. That’s unofficial, by the way. I’ve done my job. I’m off.”
Schiller went upstairs with one assistant. The other stayed below to try and get statements from Frau Popovic and the bookseller. Neighbors began to gather up and down the street. There were now three official cars outside the apartment house.
Like his uniformed colleague, Schiller gave a low whistle when he saw the contents of the master bedroom. Renate Heimendorf and her pimp were still where they had fallen, the head of the near-naked woman lying close to the door, under whose sill the blood had leaked outside. The pimp was across the room, slumped with his back to the TV set, the expression of surprise still on his face. The TV set was off. The bed with the black silk sheets still bore the indentations of two bodies that had once lain there.
Treading carefully, Schiller flipped open a number of the closets and drawers.
“A hooker,” he said. “Call girl, whatever. Wonder if they knew dow
nstairs. We’ll ask. In fact, we’ll need all the tenants. Start to get a list of names.”
The assistant commissar, Wiechert, was about to go when he said, “I’ve seen the man somewhere before. ... Hoppe. Bernhard Hoppe. Bank robbery, I think. A hard man.”