was always the preferable option.
The American stood in front of the shed, staring brazenly. Hadn’t he gotten the news that the whole thing was over? Stupid pest. And-oh, no-what was this now? Bauer spied a camera lens poking from behind the far corner of the building, aimed like the barrel of a sniper rifle. It could only be that damned girl, meaning she was in direct defiance of a court order.
He would have thought she would have had enough of him by now. The people he hired had apparently dug up sufficient damning material to ruin her, although Kurt had never bothered to read it. Well, if that didn’t stop her, there were other methods. Like the one he had used against Martin Gollner, once the old snoop had finally outed himself.
The American turned away and headed for the front gate, where a taxi had just pulled up. Good riddance. But, no, he wasn’t leaving. Instead, he was helping someone climb out of the back-a woman, even older than the flower vendor, her hair as gray as the skies. She was dressed like an East German, frumpy and proletarian. It had been seventeen years since reunification, but Kurt could still always tell.
The woman stood slowly. She turned toward the sun, and Kurt’s breath caught in his throat. For the briefest moment, the contours of her face struck a deep chord of memory, sharply enough to make him recall the nauseating smell of wet wool on hot tile, from a rainy morning long ago. Then the moment passed, and in relief he realized he had been mistaken. Kurt now saw that she was just someone’s grandmother, or elderly aunt. Or maybe just an old friend of the American’s. He raised the honey-scented daffodils to his face to get the stench of wet wool out of his head. His moment of panic had been a trick of sunlight and shadow, and of the strong emotions that were always at play whenever he visited this sacred ground.
Kurt cleared his throat, as if preparing to deliver a speech. He then stepped forward with his bouquet. Too many defilers here this morning. It was time to lay the flowers on the ground and move on.
HAD BAUER SEEN HER YET? Nat believed he had. The old man had even seemed to flinch, but now he was turning away and crossing the courtyard with a bunch of flowers in his hand-a memorial bouquet, just like the ones in all of Berta’s photos. And was Berta still lurking around the corner like a gremlin? Yes. There was her lens. Maybe the sight of the old woman at Nat’s side would lure her out of hiding. Everything was according to plan. Now all he had to do was keep from blowing his lines.
Nat had enjoyed a fruitful five days since his big discovery in Switzerland. On the previous Thursday morning he had arrived at a hulking gray building on Normannenstrasse in eastern Berlin, just as it was opening for business. The top floors were now a museum. You could tour wood-paneled offices and conference rooms where a grim fellow named Erich Mielke had once presided over East Germany’s Stasi, the notorious secret police. But downstairs, where linoleum and plastic prevailed, it was still business as usual in a way, because people continued to come here regularly to pry into the secrets of others. Except now the members of the public were the ones doing the snooping, by poring over the dossiers that the Stasi had once compiled on them.
It wasn’t easy getting permission to look at the Stasi files, especially on short notice, but Steve Wallace had apparently worked his magic. The only concession was that Nat wouldn’t be allowed to use his camera, although he could take as many notes as he liked.
He had been there before, of course. You couldn’t very well be a professor of twentieth-century German history and
The files included the gleanings of as many as two million informants, from a nation of only seventeen million people. In other words, if you had attended an East German dinner party with sixteen other guests, chances are that at least two of them-possibly including you-would have been informants. The voluminous pages offered heartbreaking tales of wives ratting on husbands, and husbands on wives. Parishioners on pastors, and pastors on parishioners. Parents on children, and, as Nat already knew in Berta’s case, children on parents.
Berta was far from alone in this behavior. So far the agency had identified roughly ten thousand informants younger than eighteen. Nat knew now that Berta had come here last year to view her own file. By doing so, she had joined a procession of several million other citizens of the former East Germany who had peered through this disturbing window onto their past.
On his arrival at the front desk, Nat’s name got quick results. A supervisor was called from the back to assist him. She was dressed in black, with her hair chopped close to the scalp-a no-nonsense type who doubtless knew a string-puller when she saw one. She had set aside the requested file in advance, and now she brought it out from behind the counter and ushered him to a private viewing room.
“I hope you realize this is a very special exception,” she said sternly as they reached the door. “Normally you would not even be allowed.”
“I’m aware of that. And I thank you.” She said nothing in reply.
Nat settled in at a small table and picked up the file for Berta Heinkel, informant #314FZ. It was quite thick.
At first the contents were fairly routine. Her profile as a loyal citizen was well documented, including her membership in the Young Pioneers up to age fourteen, followed by the usual transition to the Free German Youth.
It turned out that Berta, too, had been informed on. Hardly surprising, although the list of informants was disheartening-three classmates, a schoolteacher, a principal. What an appalling way to grow up. He thought of Karen, a child of divorce, yet far more sheltered as a college freshman than Berta had been at fifteen, or younger. One girl mooned over poets and boyfriends. The other had consorted with security goons and professional snoops, thoroughly schooled in suspicion.
The informants’ reports almost invariably concerned episodes when Berta had complained about the way the state was treating her grandmother-a poor housing allowance, occasional harassment, frequent requests for police interviews, and so on. Maybe this explained why Berta had tried to keep her grandmother in line by reporting politically risky comments. A girl’s misguided attempt to keep small transgressions from growing into bigger ones. A stitch in time saves nine.
The last report filed against Berta was the most notable. A friend named Hans Koldow stated in September 1989 that she had made a wild accusation of government complicity in the recent death of her grandmother. Berta had apparently stated the belief that a fatal auto crash had been anything but an accident.
“Perhaps these statements were not actually so malicious, seeing as how she was suffering terribly from grief at the time,” Hans wrote charitably, or as charitably as a stool pigeon could. “I nonetheless felt it was my duty to report them.”
Had anything come of his complaint? The file didn’t say so, and Nat doubted it, because by then the East German government had been crumbling from within. Massive demonstrations in Leipzig and Berlin were on the boil. Only two months later the Wall had come down. Berta, it seemed, had been saved by history, only to succumb to it later.
Nat found one of the key items he was searching for just beneath Koldow’s report. It was a roster of everyone she had ever informed on. Only four people were listed. Three were Heinkels, and one was Hartz, just as on the summary Nat had gotten from his professor friend at the Free University.
But the summary had contained initials instead of forenames. Nat had reached his own conclusions as to what two of those initials must have stood for, and he was thrilled to see now that he had been correct:
3-Hannelore Heinkel, grandmother
4-Liesl Hartz, family friend
Their maiden names, he felt certain, had been Hannelore Nierendorf and Liesl Folkerts. That meant both of them had escaped from Plotzensee Prison, but for some reason Bauer-and, apparently, everyone else who mattered-had been convinced that Liesl was killed in a bombing raid on the morning of her release.
Nat suspected Gollner knew the truth-another little secret the Gestapo man had hoarded against Bauer, banking it for an uncertain future. That certainly would have explained why Gollner told Gordon in 1945 that only three people, not four, had died as the result of Bauer’s actions.
How much had Berta known? Well, she had almost certainly heard of her grandmother’s escape, from all the stories Hannelore must have told her down through the years about the White Rose. But judging from the contents of the file, Berta had barely been acquainted with the woman known as Liesl Hartz.
