Stasi Child (36 page)

‘I’m here because I was captured by your guards, the same guards who shot my deputy. But if I have my way you will be arrested, and face ultimate justice.’

Pawlitzki shook his head, fingering his gun, a look of disappointment at her answer clouding his face. ‘It won’t happen, Karin. Don’t you see? They couldn’t afford for any of this to come out. It would undermine the very fabric of the regime.’ He leant back in his chair again, wiping the hair back from his forehead. ‘In any case,’ he said, lifting the gun and then releasing the safety lever, ‘as I’ve already said, you’re not going to be around to arrest me. But I’ve got to hand it to you, you’ve followed my clues well.’

‘Your clues?’ asked Müller.

‘In the lim—’

‘I thought you said you had nothing to do with the body in the cemetery?’

Müller could see his confusion. He’d let something slip that he hadn’t wanted to, in his attempts to boast about how clever he’d been. But then Pawlitzki shrugged. ‘You’re not leaving here, and I am.’

‘Well, if I’m never getting out of here alive, there’s no harm telling me what all the digging in the mine is for . . .’

Pawlitzki sucked his teeth, uncertainty etched across his face. ‘It’s a tunnel. Ackermann and the others involved in abusing the girls wanted an escape route. We’re already under the border, going upwards. Just a few more metres and we’ll be through. And, believe it or not, I didn’t want to leave without seeing you again. I think about you still, you know. Your body . . . your
smell
.’ His thin smile caused a wave of nausea to run through her, and he frowned. ‘But now you’re here, I can see that’s not going to happen. So it will have to be the other way. What is it they say, an eye for an eye? Well, I need paying back with more than just an eye for what you’ve done to me. You turned me into this monster.’ He lifted his eyepatch, and Müller expected to recoil in horror. But this wasn’t like the bloody, ripped mess of Beate’s eye socket in the cemetery. The skin was pale, healed – more like the smooth skin on the girl’s hands.

Müller realised the man was crazy, but their best chance was to keep him talking, to use his warped feelings for her to their advantage.

‘I’m sorry,’ she lied.

‘Sorry? Sorry doesn’t do it, I’m afraid.’

She moved closer to him, still keeping eye contact, and then placed her right hand on his arm. He looked down at where their two bodies joined once more, his distorted face creased in confusion and indecision. Müller thought she saw something else in his Cyclops-like eye. Was it lust? Some sort of crazed love? It was something to cling onto: a possible last chance for herself and Irma.

Still holding Pawlitzki’s arm lightly, she began talking in a soothing voice. ‘I can understand what a burden this must have been to you. And we’re not so very different. My own marriage is in trouble. I’m about to be kicked out of the police force. I’ve no reason to stay in the Republic any more than you. What I did to you was awful, I can see that now. And I do think of you too – of us –’ She moved her face closer to his. At the same time, with her left hand behind her back, directly in Irma’s vision, she made a tiny stab with her finger into her back. Müller continued to move in, as though to kiss him, even though the thought disgusted her. Even the memory of kissing him disgusted her. Her abortion disgusted her. The rape that led to him losing his job disgusted her. But in his good eye, she could see his longing, his need. They only needed an instant.

At that moment, Irma jumped up. Before Pawlitzki could change his mindset and retrieve his gun, Müller grabbed both of his arms and Irma plunged the meat knife into his neck. All the force from muscle built in months of slavery concentrated into one blow. Pawlitzki went white with shock, blood pumping from the wound.

He fell back, trying to stem the blood flow with one hand. ‘Guards,’ he shouted. There were responding noises and shouts outside the room, but then the sounds of automatic gunfire.

A plain-clothes officer burst in through the door. Another round of automatic fire into Pawlitzki’s abdomen, chest and head, finishing the job Irma had started. He slumped back. Müller looked up in shock as another man entered the subterranean room.

Jäger!

Everything was unfolding so quickly, Müller struggled to make sense of it. She was about to say something to the Stasi lieutenant colonel when she saw the first officer raising his gun arm, aiming towards Irma. She screamed ‘No! No!’ at Jäger, but the
Oberstleutnant
made no effort to stop the gunman. Müller in that instant leapt across to shield the girl with her body.

She saw the flash, felt bullets tear into her flesh. Only then did she hear Jäger’s cry of ‘Hold your fire!’

53

March 1975.

Hohenschönhausen, East Berlin.

Gottfried Müller had tried to keep count of the days in his head, but with the constant yet irregular flashing of the light at night-time, he’d pretty much lost track. Ten days, eleven, two weeks . . . he had no clear idea.

His visit from Karin had been the one thing he was clinging to. Surely she would help him? But a strict coldness gripped his heart as he recalled her guilty expression when she’d admitted the photographs of her entwined with Tilsner were genuine. And there had been the second bout of questioning. It didn’t seem to be the fake photographs they were interested in anymore . . . Instead they’d been focusing on Pastor Grosinski. Saying he’d been spying for the West. And that Gottfried had been passing him information, information about the police, his wife, her latest murder case. That, they said, constituted spying in itself . . . Helping a foreign power to undermine the Republic.

It was madness, absolute madness. But in his tiredness, his hopelessness, his utter fatigue, Gottfried wasn’t entirely sure what he’d agreed to. It was true – he
had
talked to the pastor about his marriage, and about the murder case. But that was merely meant as an example of the problems Karin and he faced. Her obsession with her work. But when they’d thrust the papers in front of him, he wasn’t sure what it was he’d actually been forced to sign.

The sound of keys being turned in the lock startled him. Was this it? Would they just take him into a yard somewhere and shoot him? It was the same guard who’d taken him to the two interviews with Hunsberger. Gottfried tried to cling to the bed, but the guard roughly grabbed his hands, forced them together and cuffed him.

‘No!’ he screamed. ‘I haven’t done anything. It’s all a mistake.’ The guard yanked him to his feet, but Gottfried was too weak to resist. Then he was prodded in the back, and forced to walk into the corridor. The red lights, doors, the clanking and clanging of metal. Finally, the garage with blinding floodlights, where he’d arrived the first day. And there it was again: the prison on wheels in which he’d been transported here.

‘Where are you taking me?’ he shouted as another guard arrived; both guards tried to push and pull him into the small van. Finally, he gave up, stopped resisting and let them do with his body whatever they wanted.

He was shoved into one of the tiny cells in the back of the vehicle, forced to crouch once more in the darkness – the too-small cell that stank of piss and shit, his body unable to stretch out, crushed against the sides, the floor and the roof.

Then the engine started, and Gottfried readied himself to endure a reprise of his journey all those long days and nights ago. He didn’t know where they were taking him then, and he didn’t know now. Acceleration, deceleration. Stop. Start. Banging him about just like before. Was he being taken to another jail? Or did a far worse fate now await him?

54

Day Seventeen.

The Harz mountains, East Germany.

Müller grabbed her left arm and squeezed to try to stop the flow of blood. At the instant the officer had fired, Jäger had stuck out his arm, pushing the barrel away fractionally – enough so that she just caught a glancing blow. Müller knew she had been lucky.

She felt Irma under her, moving. Alive.

Jäger stepped towards them.

‘Don’t touch me,’ Müller screamed. ‘Or her.’ She’d trusted him . . . Those intimate meetings at the Kulturpark, the Märchenbrunnen, the Weisser See. Yet an instant earlier, Jäger would have quite happily allowed Irma to be shot dead.

The Stasi
Oberstleutnant
backed off. He began issuing new orders to the plain-clothes officer – presumably a Stasi agent allied to Jäger’s faction. From outside, Müller could hear more gunfire, more screams and the sounds of explosions.

‘Are you OK?’ whispered Irma, shuffling to try to get comfortable under the weight of Müller’s body.

‘Yes, are you?’ asked the detective. She felt Irma’s head nod behind her, felt the grip from the girl on her good arm.

Jäger moved out of the room, issuing more orders, and then suddenly – in front of her face – there was the friendly giant smile of
Hauptmann
Baumann, and behind him,
Unterleutnant
Vogel.
Kripo
officers like herself; people she felt she could trust.

‘I’m only moving away from her if you guarantee she won’t be harmed,’ she said to Baumann.

He nodded. ‘You’ll both be OK. I give you my word.’ He unwrapped a bandage handed to him by Vogel, and wrapped it tightly round the flesh wound in Müller’s arm. ‘We need to get you to hospital as soon as possible.’

‘She has to come with me. Don’t let Jäger near her,’ she said, fiercely.

Vogel helped Baumann to lift Müller up. The junior officer smiled too. ‘We will look after you both,
Oberleutnant
Müller.’ Then Baumann knelt down to comfort Irma and double-check that she was unharmed.

Müller glanced at Pawlitzki’s crumpled body in the corner of the room. The second former police colleague shot dead in less than twenty-four hours. At least, she assumed Tilsner must be dead.

‘Have you found Werner?’ she asked Vogel.

He lowered his eyes, and nodded slowly. She didn’t have to ask if he was dead. She could see it in Vogel’s expression.

‘He’s being taken to hospital. But it doesn’t look good.’

Müller breathed in sharply.

‘So he’s still alive?’

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ said Vogel. ‘There was a faint pulse, that’s all.’

Vogel and Baumann were true to their word, escorting Müller and Irma to the hospital so she wouldn’t have to have anything to do with Jäger for the time being. As they helped her climb the few steps to the surface, Baumann explained what the bunker was – a forward command post linked to Hitler’s development of V2 rockets in the latter days of the war. Müller – in her groggy state – only partly took it in. She knew the main V2 production site after it was moved from the Ostsee coast had been further south in the Harz, near Nordhausen, but she guessed it made some sort of sense. As they got back to the mine house, Müller saw bodies scattered around, their white camouflage clothing besmirched with crimson, lying in the snow between the trees. Smoke and dust rose from the mineshaft itself, presumably the aftermath of the explosions she’d heard. Were they sealing Pawlitzki’s putative escape route?

The two local
Kripo
detectives drove Müller and Irma in a four-wheel-drive vehicle back up the forest track. Her head swivelled round as they passed the site where Tilsner had been shot. And then she saw the terror and confusion in Irma’s face and reached out to hug her, wincing from her injured arm as she did so.

‘Shhh,’ whispered Müller. ‘It will be alright now. It’s over.’

Irma looked up at her, a defeated expression in her face. ‘For you, perhaps. You will be going back to your secure job in the police force.’ Müller wasn’t as sure as the girl was that her career wasn’t over. After all, she’d defied Reiniger and broken rule after rule. ‘For me it’s not over,’ continued Irma. ‘I will be going back to the
Jugendwerkhof
. That, or a prison, and I cannot believe there is much difference.’

Müller held the girl’s gaze as the police vehicle bumped along the snow-covered forest track. ‘I won’t allow that to happen. I promise you,’ she said.

At the top of the track, as they reached the plateau, Müller scanned the side of the road, looking for the Wartburg.

Baumann must have seen her searching for it in the rear-view mirror. ‘Your car’s a write-off, I’m afraid, Comrade Müller. They burnt it out and pushed it over the side. That’s what alerted us to everything.’

Müller frowned, rubbing her bandaged arm gingerly. ‘And was Jäger with you?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Baumann. ‘Jäger and his Stasi men were already down there. We arrived just as the fun was starting.’

‘So who alerted Jäger?’ asked Müller, perplexed. Although Pawlitzki had partially filled her in on his side of the story, there was still much she didn’t understand.

‘We don’t know, Comrade Müller. You’ll have to ask him that yourself.’

55

Day Nineteen.

The Harz mountains, East Germany.

Müller and Irma stayed in Wernigerode Hospital for two days. Müller insisted on a private room, with a twenty-four-hour guard provided thanks to Baumann and Vogel pulling strings at the local People’s Police headquarters. She also insisted on keeping her Makarov at her bedside.

The doctors were more concerned about the leg wound from the tripwire than her arm, which they maintained was little more than a graze.

She looked across at Irma, sleeping in the next bed. And then she ran her fingers lightly over the trigger of the gun, as though to reassure herself it was still there.

Irma was suffering from shock and mild malnutrition. After a day, the doctors said she was well enough to be discharged, but Müller overruled them; the girl was staying with her. When they tried to disagree, she called in Dr Eckstein. The senior pathologist concurred with her. The more junior members of staff evidently revered him even though his speciality was the dead rather than the living.

What of Gottfried? She still had no news of him, and her best hope – Jäger – was someone she no longer wanted to deal with. She remembered Schmidt and the photos, and asked the nurse if she could use the telephone in the office. Irma would surely be safe on her own for a few minutes, wouldn’t she? Müller made sure the People’s Police guard knew where she’d gone.