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“Yes. She said Bruno still worked in optical glassware, for a firm called BKI in Würzburg. But it seems BKI is owned by Pilkington Glass of Britain, and with Bruno’s retirement approaching, she needed details of his life to assess his full entitlement. She was not from Bruno’s employers?”
“I doubt it. Probably West German police. I’m afraid they are looking for Bruno, too, but not to help him.”
“I’m sorry. I seem to have been very foolish.”
“You weren’t to know, Mrs. Farquarson. She spoke good English?”
“Yes, perfect. Slight accent—Polish, perhaps.”
McCready had little doubt where the lady had come from. There were other hunters out for Bruno Morenz, many of them, but only McCready and one other group knew about BKI of Würzburg. He rose.
“Try hard to think what little he said in those years after the war. Is there anyone, anyone at all, to whom he might go in his hour of need for sanctuary?”
She thought long and hard.
“There was one name he mentioned, someone who had been nice to him. His primary-school teacher. Fräulein ... dammit ... Fräulein Neuberg. No, I remember now, Fräulein Neumann. That was it. Neumann. Of course, she’s probably dead by now. It was forty years ago.”
“One last thing, Mrs. Farquarson. Did you tell this to the lady from the glass company?”
“No, I’ve only just remembered it. I just told her Bruno had once spent two years as an evacuee on a farm not ten miles from Weimar.”
Back at Century House, McCready borrowed a Weimar telephone directory from the East German desk. There were several Neumanns listed, but just one with Frl, short for Fräulein, in front of it. A spinster. A teenager would not have her own apartment and phone, not in East Germany. A mature spinster, a professional woman, might. It was a long shot, very long. He could have one of the East German desk’s agents-in-place across the Wall place a call. But the Stasi were everywhere, bugging everything. The mere question— “Were you once the schoolteacher of a small boy called Morenz and has he showed up?”—that could blow it all away.
His next visit was to the section inside Century House whose specialty is the preparation of very untrue identity cards.
He rang British Airways, who were unable to help. But Lufthansa was. They had a flight at five-fifteen to Hanover. He asked Denis Gaunt to drive him to Heathrow again.
The best-laid plans of mice and men, as the Scottish poet might have said, sometimes end up looking like a dog’s breakfast. The Polish Airlines flight from London back to Warsaw via East Berlin was due for takeoff at three-thirty. But when the pilot switched on his flight systems, a red warning light glowed. It turned out to be just a faulty solenoid, but it delayed the takeoff until six. In the departures lounge, Major Ludmilla Vanavskaya glanced at the televised departure information, noted the delay “for operational reasons,” cursed silently, and returned to her book.
McCready was leaving the office when the phone rang. He debated whether to answer it and decided he ought to. It could be important. It was Edwards.
“Sam, someone in Funny Paper has been on to me. Now look, Sam, you are not—as in absolutely not—getting my permission to go into East Germany. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely, Timothy. Couldn’t be clearer.”
“Good,” said the Assistant Chief, and put the phone down.
Gaunt had heard the voice at the other end of the phone and what it had said. McCready was beginning to like Gaunt. He had joined the desk only six months earlier, but he was showing he was bright, trustworthy, and could keep his mouth shut.
As he negotiated Hogarth Roundabout, cutting a lot of corners in the dense Friday-afternoon commuter traffic on the Heathrow road, Gaunt chose to open it.
“Sam, I know you’ve been in more tight places than a shepherd’s right arm, but you’ve been black-flagged in East Germany and the boss has forbidden you to go back.”
“Forbidding is one thing,” said McCready. “Preventing is another.”
As he strode through the departure lounge of Terminal Two to catch the Lufthansa flight to Hanover, he cast not a glance at the trim young woman with the shiny blond hair and piercing blue eyes who sat reading two yards from him. And she did not look up at the medium-built, rather rumpled man with thinning brown hair in a gray raincoat as he walked past.
McCready’s flight took off on time, and he landed at Hanover at eight, local time. Major Vanavskaya got away at six and landed at Berlin-Schönefeld at nine. McCready rented a car and drove past Hildesheim and Salzgitter to his destination in the forests outside Goslar. Vanavskaya was met by a KGB car and driven to Normannenstrasse 22. She had to wait an hour to see Colonel Otto Voss, who was closeted with State Security Minister Erich Mielke.
McCready had telephoned his host from London; he was expected. The man met him at the front door of his substantial home, a beautifully converted hunting lodge set on a sweep of hillside with a view, in daylight, far across a long valley clothed in conifers. Only five miles away, the lights of Goslar twinkled in the gloom. Had the day not already faded, McCready might have seen, far to the east on a distant peak of the Harz, the roof of a high tower. One might have mistaken it for a hunting tower, but it wasn’t. Its purpose was the hunting not of wild boar but of men and women. The man McCready had come to visit had chosen to spend his comfortable retirement within sight of the very border that had once made his fortune.
His host had changed over the years, thought McCready as he was shown into a wood-paneled sitting room hung with the heads of boars and the antlers of stags. A bright fire crackled in a stone hearth; even in early September it was chilly at night in the high hills.
The man who greeted him had put on weight; the once-lean physique was now fleshed out. He was still short, of course, and the round pink face topped by white candy-floss hair made him look even more harmless than ever. Until you looked into his eyes. Cunning eyes, wily eyes that had seen too much and made many deals about life and death and that had lived in the sewers and survived. A malign child of the Cold War who had once been the uncrowned underworld king of Berlin.
For twenty years, from the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 until his retirement in 1981, Andre Kurzlinger had been a Grenzgänger, literally, a border-goer, a border-crosser. It was the Wall that had made his fortune. Prior to its construction, East Germans wishing to escape to the West simply had to go to East Berlin and walk into West Berlin. But during the night of August 21, 1961, the great concrete blocks had been slammed into place, and Berlin became the divided city. Many tried to jump the Wall; some succeeded. Others were hauled back screaming and sent to long terms of jail. Others were machine-gunned on the wire and hung there like stoats until cut down. For most, crossing the Wall was a one-time exploit. For Kurzlinger, who until then had been just a Berlin black marketeer and gangster, it became a profession.
He brought people out—for money. He went across in a variety of disguises, or sent emissaries, and negotiated the price. Some paid in Ostmarks—a lot of Ostmarks. With these, Kurzlinger would buy the three products in East Berlin that were good: Hungarian pigskin luggage, Czech classical LPs, and Cuban corona coronas. They were so cheap that, even with the cost of smuggling them west, Kurzlinger could make a huge profit.