Colonel Kardich said, ‘I have arranged for a doctor to come and arrange your wounds. You will not be pretty for several days, but you will survive. Your stupid action has come at an inconvenient time. I have arranged this afternoon for you to meet a most important person. He has flown here especially to see you.’
‘Flown in from Moscow, eh?’ Hawn said, without moving. ‘In the meantime, I have given orders that if you make any further trouble, you are to be handcuffed to this bed. I repeat, you have been most fortunate.’
‘Bloody fortunate. The German Democratic Republic welcomes you — arrest on arrival, interrogation, locked in a bare room, smashed up with rifle butts.’ He paused, exhausted; and felt the bed stir as Colonel Kardich stood up. A moment later the door opened then clanged shut.
Hawn and Anna met again in Colonel Kardich’s room. This time two Vopos — ones they had not seen before — stood on either side of the door. Hawn’s head was tightly bandaged and the blood had been wiped off, and his bloated lips and the side of his nose were now thick and sticky with some foul-smelling antiseptic jelly. His head still ached and there was a dull pain in his gut; but he could just walk straight and use his arms.
Kardich said, ‘I have explained to Miss Admiral here that you will be meeting with a gentleman who has arrived especially at Oranienburg to see you both. He knows certain of the events in which you are involved, so he will know if you are lying, or when you ignore certain facts. So you will tell him everything. It is not my duty to question you further. So — do you have any further questions to put to me?’
‘Our passports,’ Hawn said. ‘Do we get them back? And when will we be allowed to leave the country?’
‘That will depend on the satisfactory outcome of the meeting that has been arranged for you.’ He stood up. ‘We will go now.’
The two Vopos led the way at a discreet distance, as though Hawn carried some contagious disease. Colonel Kardich walked behind. They left the building, crossed the corner of the parade ground, through an arch where a red-and-white pole with an illuminated disc saying HALT! had been raised for them; and out into a grey street where it was already getting dark.
The Klub Hotel was three minutes’ walk away: an anonymous block of dirty yellow concrete, brightened up with the statutory bunch of red flags and a slogan urging the German people to fight for peace.
The Vopos stopped outside on the steps. Kardich ushered the other two ahead of him. Despite Hawn’s appearance, the clerk at the desk pretended to take no notice of them. They took the lift up to the fourth floor. The door was at the end of the corridor. Kardich knocked twice, and the door was immediately opened.
Hawn had difficulty focusing with his good eye. He could just make out a youngish man of medium height, with a plump, pale face and sleek black hair. He was casually but expensively dressed — rather too expensively for the ordinary East German, Hawn thought. But then what was the ordinary East German? Kardich? The Vopos? Doktor Oskar Wohl?
Kardich made no effort to introduce them. Instead, he turned to Hawn. ‘I shall be downstairs. The guards will stay at the door. There is only the one entrance. The exit at the back through the kitchens has been locked. I mention this in case you are foolish enough to try to escape.’ He nodded to them both, ignoring the guest whose room they were in, then turned back down the corridor.
The pale, sleek-haired man closed the door and beckoned the two of them across the room — a bland modern room, typical of any second-class European hotel. Television set in the corner; push button radio over the bed; a Gauguin reproduction on one wall; and by the door, next to the long list of the hotel’s rules and regulations, a map of the area — green, flat, with few towns or villages or roads, the whole area spattered with small lakes. A memory stirred in Hawn’s battered mind: two lines by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, with words added by the late Doktor Hans Dieter Mönch. ‘The little birds are silent in the wood by the lake — just wait, soon you will be silent too…’
Their host had sat down on the bed, after waving them both into the two armchairs. It was obvious that he had only just arrived; his single suitcase — a cheap grip bag affair — stood unopened behind the door. He sat forward and gave Hawn a bright grin: ‘My goodness, they seem to have given you a good walloping! What did you do? Hit one of those bloody Vopos?’
‘That’s exactly what I did.’ Hawn’s mind was now fully alert. The man had spoken English — fluent, rather guarded English with a very slight, unplaceable accent. Not recognizably German, and not quite English either. He went on: ‘So you just arrived last night, eh? First time in the Workers’ Paradise! They certainly must have left you with a lovely impression. But you really shouldn’t go around hitting policemen. I’m not speaking up as the old bobby’s spokesman — I just believe in giving them a wide berth.
‘I once knew an Australian — news photographer based out in Beirut — biggest man I ever met. He was married to a South African girl, bust up with her, and she got custody of the three kids. Then this mad Ozzie bastard kidnapped them and tried to smuggle them out to what was then Botswanaland. He was picked up at the border by the police, and he put seven of ’em in hospital. And Afrikaans
