Brandenburg (3 page)

Now some words came from him. ‘Rye . . . Ryszard . . . Rye . . . Kusimiak.’ Rosenharte’s backside came down involuntarily on the shiny warm surface of the bollard.

‘Be still, for God’s sake, or . . .’ At that moment he lost his footing and found he had no purchase to stop the momentum of the other man. For a second he was suspended over the water, then he toppled from the bollard. Falling the four or five feet, he was certain he saw the man’s hand reach to his pocket before he dropped forward and rolled down the quay wall into the water like a weighted sack.

More angry than shocked, Rosenharte surfaced and struck out to a chain that was hanging down from the top of the quay. He grabbed it, placed both feet against the barnacle-encrusted stone and began to haul himself up, pulling the chain through his hands. As he cleared the water line he heard a voice and looked up to see a man holding out his hand. He was yelling something in Italian. Rosenharte wrapped the slimy chain around one hand and took a few more steps, but at this point his angle to the quay made it impossible for him to proceed further. He moved to the left, then swung back in the opposite direction and reached out to grab hold of the Italian’s hand. A few desperate moments of scrambling ensued before he was kneeling on the quay, hacking the seawater from his throat.

He wiped his eyes and looked up. Around them stood a semi-circle of teenage boys with fishing rods. Rosenharte gazed into a broad young face and a pair of intelligent blue eyes and nodded to show he was okay. The man put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You’re okay; just stay there for a bit.’ Rosenharte knew this was no Italian.

Then one of the boys caught sight of the body in the water and started shouting. All five stripped off and dived in, apparently unconcerned about what they might find. One unceremoniously yanked the man’s head up by the hair while the others shoaled round and pushed the body towards the chain.

‘Perhaps it’s better that I speak German,’ hissed the man after he’d instructed the boys in Italian to loop the chain under the body’s arms and tie a knot.

It was the last thing Rosenharte wanted. He shook his head furiously, put his hand in his shirt and ripped the wire from his chest.

The man showed little surprise. ‘Don’t worry, it won’t work after that soaking.’

‘Who are you?’

‘A friend of Annalise.’ The man was looking back up the pier at the people who had materialized from nowhere.

‘You’re English?’ said Rosenharte.

He nodded. ‘Is he one of your people?’ he asked, pointing to the water.

‘My people? No.’

‘Look, we’re about to be joined by the police.’ The Englishman gestured with his chin. Rosenharte turned to see a navy-blue Alfa Romeo threading its way through the scrap iron. ‘Be at the Ristorante Grand Canale by nine thirty. Take a table outside, on the canal pontoon. Just make it seem as though you happened on the restaurant by chance. You got that?’ He punched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Good fellow - everything will be okay.’

Rosenharte had seen the restaurant on the canal and thought that it looked expensive. He was about to protest, when one of the boys shouted at them to take up the slack on the chain and begin hauling the body out of the water. They both looked over the quay to see that it had snagged on a protruding stone. At that moment two policemen jogged from their car to help pull the man over the edge. The Englishman knelt down and began rhythmically pumping at the man’s back. Water began to dribble from the mouth but when the cough he was hoping for didn’t come, he rolled the man over, felt his pulse and listened to his chest. His hands moved expertly around the body, at one point slipping inside his jacket. Then he took hold of the nose and chin and pushed the head back slightly. No sooner had he touched the man’s lips with his own than he recoiled, wiping his mouth furiously on his shirt and spitting on the ground. One of the policemen attempted to take over, but the Englishman pulled him back saying there was something wrong. ‘
Attenzione, Signore, non e buono
.’

A sense of contagion swept the boys who had just clambered out of the water and they all began to back away from the body. Rosenharte looked down with a candid lack of emotion at first but then bafflement and shock hit him. He wondered what the sudden extinction of this ordinary human being meant for him. Things like this didn’t just happen.

From the warehouse, Robert Harland watched the police car with Rosenharte inside disappear through the Old Port gates, followed by the ambulance carrying the body, and considered whether his operation was compromised. He too was certain that the struggle with the man on the pier and the death were significant. He turned to Cuth Avocet - the gaunt figure known throughout British SIS as the Bird - who had slipped up a back stairway to join them in the dusk of the old leather store. ‘What the hell was that about?’ he asked.

‘Search me,’ said the Bird. ‘I guess we’ll know a bit more when Jamie reports back.’

‘At least he was in position,’ Harp said.

‘Point taken,’ said Harland. He looked out over the water. ‘We’d better get back to the van and start preparing the watch on the restaurant.’

‘The fellow’s hardly going to feel like meat and two veg after someone’s just tried to do him in,’ said the Bird lazily.

‘It didn’t look as though he was trying to kill him,’ said Harland. ‘I watched the whole thing. At the end Rosenharte was trying to help him. Let’s be going.’

The Bird put out an arm. ‘Perhaps you should wait for the area to clear first. There’s a couple of bogies down there.’ He pointed to two men who’d materialized from beneath them and were making for the dock gates.

‘That makes . . .’

‘Fourteen,’ said Harp.

‘So now we know what we’re up against,’ said Harland.

Half an hour later, Harland sat in the back of the black Volkswagen van with Jamie Jay, sorting through the contents of the black leather wallet that was still swollen from immersion in the Adriatic. Harland held up an identity card to the light and read out the name Franciscek Grycko. ‘What’s a bloody Pole doing here? The Stasi and the Polish spooks are barely on speaking terms. Normannenstrasse wouldn’t involve them in something like this. They’re considered far too insecure.’

Jay read one of the business cards, which had fallen out in a little wad. ‘It says Grycko is a sales representative of a shoe business - International Quality Shoes, Wroclaw.’

‘Shoe business!’ said Harland contemptuously.

‘There’s no business like . . .’ Seeing Harland’s face Jay stifled the joke.

‘It’s a pity you didn’t get his passport,’ Harland said.

Jay looked offended. ‘You try kissing a dead shoe salesman with vomit in his mouth and see how long you can stand feeling him up at the same time. As things are, I probably established some kind of record out there.’

‘You think they knew each other?’

Jay shook his head. ‘Rosenharte said the man had an attack of some sort - practically fell into his arms foaming at the mouth.’

‘We saw it from the warehouse. I got the impression he was just trying to speak to him. What about the taste you mentioned? You think it was poison?’

Jay wrinkled his nose. ‘Dunno.
I
feel okay.’

‘Good. So who’s monitoring his phone at the hotel?’

‘Cuth has gone to take over from Jessie.’

‘Christ, I hope Jessie’s changed by now.’

‘Of course. She’ll look just the part. Rosenharte’s going to fall in love all over again.’

‘We don’t need him to. All that matters is that the Stasi believe she really is Annalise.’ Harland noticed the doubt in Jay’s eyes. ‘What?’ he demanded.

‘Well, there’s so much that is out of our control.’

‘It’s an intelligence operation, for Pete’s sake, Jamie, not a bloody garden party.’

‘Well, we’ve done our best with the letters and Jessie, but in the end it all depends on Rosenharte’s reaction.’

‘Right,’ said Harland. ‘If for one moment he looks like he doesn’t recognize her, or gives the slightest hint she isn’t Annalise, he’s lost and might as well defect tonight. He won’t last a minute under Schwarzmeer’s interrogation.’

‘Schwarzmeer?’

‘Yes, Brigadier-General Julius Schwarzmeer, director of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung.’ He paused and looked at Jay’s eager face. ‘Sorry, I forget that you’re rather rusty on all this. Still, it’s good of you to give your time like this.’

‘The HVA is the foreign arm of the Stasi - a subsection, right?’

‘Yes, they’re in the same building in Normannenstrasse and the HVA has officers in all the Stasi regional headquarters.’

‘The same people, then?’

‘The HVA are better trained, better paid and allowed to travel to the West. The ordinary Stasi officer has to make do with the occasional holiday in Bulgaria.’

‘And the purpose of all this? I mean, I get the immediate aim, but what’s the bigger picture?’

‘If it comes off, you’ll see. It may even help in your patch.’

‘With all respect I very much doubt Oman is going to benefit from this.’

‘You’d be surprised. Shake the sand out of your boots, Jamie. There’s a lot to connect the problems in your part of the world with the Stasi. That’s what this operation is about. That’s why I have the chief’s blessing and why the Joint Intelligence Committee so eagerly await the results of our efforts here tonight.’ He stopped. ‘Look, I’d better be getting along. I want to give the wallet to the Italians and I’m interested to hear what they’ve got to say about Rosenharte’s state of mind after that business out on the pier.’

They climbed out the back of the van together. It was almost dark by now. Harland noticed that huge thunderclouds had formed and trapped the heat in the city. The last light from the west touched their summits and gave each a rosy peak.

Jay set off in the direction of the Grand Canal while Harland turned from the sea and headed for an old insurance building near the Carabinieri headquarters, where Ludovico Prelli was running the Italian surveillance operation as a personal favour to Harland.

On reaching the building he passed a security check at the door and leapt up the echoing stairway to the first floor, where two men inspected his diplomatic passport. He was directed through a wide passage that was filled with some of Prelli’s team of watchers. From within Prelli’s office, a little way along the passage, Harland heard the low, humorous growl of Alan Griswald, his CIA counterpart in Berlin, who had excused himself from a family holiday in Venice to be in Trieste for the next twenty-four hours.

‘Hey there,’ said Harland. ‘What news from the Rialto?’

‘Nothing, ’cept I doted on your very absence, Bobby,’ replied Griswald.

‘It’s good to have you here. Thanks for coming.’

‘It was wonderful but I couldn’t look at another Tintoretto ceiling.’

‘Has Ludo filled you in on what just happened in the Old Port?’ Harland shook Prelli’s hand and gave him the wallet. ‘He was a Pole named Grycko. A shoe salesman. Does that mean anything to you?’

Griswald shook his head. ‘What did he die of?’

‘Heart attack, maybe. He had a lot of saliva around his mouth. Maybe poison was involved, but my man tried to give him the kiss of life and he seems to be okay. Anyway, we’ll have the post-mortem results by tomorrow. Right, Ludo?’

‘No, by this evening, I think,’ said the Italian.

Harland sat down. ‘What did the police think of Rosenharte? What was his mood like when they took him back to the hotel?’

The Italian pressed his fingertips together and looked thoughtful. ‘The police say they thought that he did not want to show what he was thinking. He was shocked but he controlled himself, like you English.’ He smiled at Harland.

Harland nodded, picked up the straw hat, which had been retrieved from Molo IV, and examined the inside rim. ‘I wonder who the hell he was,’ he said.

Rosenharte arrived at the restaurant with his hair damp and his shirt still showing signs of compression from the small plastic suitcase that he’d brought from Dresden. He was led to a table at the far end of the pontoon, where he sat down and ordered a bottle of local white wine. He turned his face towards the sea breeze that was beginning to tug at the corner of the pink tablecloth and, feeling a little conspicuous among these chic Italians, lit a cigarette.

All but two of the ten tables on the pontoon were occupied, mostly with young couples leaning into each other with unforced intimacy. He slipped down in his chair a little and watched the people drift along the banks of the canal. Some Latin-American music struck up in one of the alleys leading towards the centre of town. On hearing this, a couple strolling by paused, took each other’s arms and executed a few perfect steps of dance under the cone of a street light before fading into the shadows like phantoms.

It was still hot but the breeze was cooling him down and he was able to log the men and women strolling along the canal who seemed to have no particular object in view and yet were curiously attracted to this stretch of the water. He noted with a certain relief that the old muscles were beginning to flex; the instincts that he had been taught to use at an almost subliminal speed in Stasi training school were coming back. If the beginning of the evening was anything to go by, he would need them.

He was there ten minutes before he became aware of a woman standing on the gangway leading to the pontoon. Her gaze came to rest on him and she gave a shy little wave. For a moment he stared dumbly at her, unable to think of what to do, then gave a half-hearted wave himself. She was heavier than Annalise but the difference could easily be due to the passage of time. Her hair was about right, too - dark and pulled back by a clip, and her outfit - the white linen skirt, loose jacket, canvas shoes and sagging shoulder bag - was exactly what the middle-aged Annalise would have worn. But, to be frank, she was nothing like as beautiful as Annalise and had none of her lightness of movement and grace. She was now beside the table, wreathed in smiles and holding out both hands, palms outward.

‘For Christ’s sake stand up,’ she hissed in English without losing the pleasure in her face. ‘Stand up and take hold of my hands. Look into my eyes, then give me a hug and kiss me.’