Sophie looked stunned. ‘That is a lie,’ she said, her sniffs turning to sobs.
‘Paul said that he was brought back by Günter just at the moment …’
‘Oh God, oh God,’ moaned Sophie. ‘That can’t be true, it can’t. Why do you tell me this? It can’t be true.’
‘Sophie …’ Francesca tried to remain composed. ‘I am only telling you what Paul told me.’
‘He is lying. He must be lying. He is so jealous. He has never forgiven me. He makes up such stories just to punish us … And now, you too, you say these terrible things about Stefi who has been so good to you …’
Francesca was a little taken aback to find that she was the one in the dock. ‘I am sorry, Sophie. Perhaps I should have kept quiet. But, well …’
‘You don’t like Stefi. You never did. So now you spread these lies about him …’
‘It’s not that I don’t like him, Sophie. It’s just that I don’t … Well, if what Paul said was true, then there would be some serious implications …’
‘Implications? What do you mean, implications?’
‘Well, possibilities.’
‘I know what you mean. You think that Stefi worked for the Stasi. Of course. It’s so easy to say that, isn’t it, because his file is missing so he can never disprove it. Other people say it, I know, behind his back because they are envious because he is a minister and they are nothing, nothing … But if Stefi was an IM, then why did he marry me? Was he ordered to do it? Is that what you mean? Are you suggesting that for ten years I have been making love to a man who does not love me? Do you think that a woman cannot tell? I tell you, Francesca, that Stefi has loved me in a way that Paul never did for all his talk about holy matrimony. Paul did not love my body as Stefi loves my body and certainly, certainly, he never loved my soul.’
Francesca left the flat on the Wedekindstrasse as soon as she reasonably could, and if she and Sophie did not part enemies, they hardly parted friends. Francesca’s disclosures had served no purpose. All they had established was that Sophie still loved Stefi, and that Sophie was still a fool.
All at once, in the dark dusk of East Berlin, Francesca felt frightened and far from home, surrounded by Germans, none of whom she could trust. She wished that Andrei had been in Berlin, if only to tell her that her anxiety was absurd. It was quite possible, after all, that Stefan had had nothing to do with the Stasi; that Paul’s suspicions were, as Sophie had suggested, a way of demeaning his rival in his own mind.
But if Stefi had worked for the Stasi, why should he want to put on an exhibition of experimental Russian art? And why should he want Sophie to say that it had been Francesca’s idea? Sophie assumed that it was to give her friend all the credit, but if anything went wrong she would also be there to take the blame.
The realization that she had been instrumental in bringing such a unique collection to Berlin at Stefi’s instigation filled Francesca with unease. Many of the world’s finest modern paintings were now sitting in the warehouse in Tegel. Who had recommended the warehouse to the committee? She had, at Günter’s suggestion. She had checked the security; it had seemed superb, but she had known nothing about the company that owned it, or about the staff that were employed to guard the works of art. Who reassured them about Omni Zartfracht? She could not remember. Either one of Stefi’s officials or Günter Westarp who, according to Paul, had also collaborated with the Stasi.
The brighter street lights and shop windows told Francesca that she was now in West Berlin. She was still making for her flat in the Hansa Quarter, but she now realized that she could not possibly just go home. She must pass on her anxieties, but to whom? The police? The American consul? What could she tell them? That she did not trust the provincial Minister of Culture? They would think she was crazy.
Andrei was the only person who would listen without laughing and then either reassure her or know exactly what should be done. But without Andrei she had to do something herself, and the only thing she could think of was to drive on to Tegel and make sure that the paintings were safe. She was well enough known by the Omni Zartfracht people; she could say that she had come to make some last minute checks before the hanging started the next day.
She drove down the Hardenbergstrasse, joined the Stadtring at Charlottenburg and a short time later reached Tegel. It was now dark, and outside the centre of the city there were few lamps and no shop windows to light up the streets. Francesca was tense and exhausted. She took a wrong turn and lost her way. She had to stop the car, take out her Falkplan and read the street sign to take a bearing. She found where she was and memorized the route to the warehouse. A light blinked on her fuel gauge; she was almost out of gas. She had never been to the warehouse at night and could not see any familiar landmarks in the dark. Then suddenly she saw the line of lights illuminating the fenced perimeter and came at last to the gate.
Francesca stopped her car and got out to ring the buzzer to announce her presence to the guard, but before she pressed it she saw that one of the gates was open. The gap was not wide, perhaps five or six inches, but it was nevertheless odd. She looked down to the warehouse. Its doors were closed. There were no vehicles outside the office, but a light came from the window. She knew that normally at least three security guards were on duty all through the night. She feared they were all drinking coffee or playing cards.
She pressed the buzzer and waited. There was no answer. She tried again. There was still no answer. She went back to her car, switched off the motor, then walked through the open gate and down the fifty-yard tarmac drive to the office door. She knocked, waited and heard nothing. She turned the handle. The door opened. She went in.
The lights were on in the anteroom but there was no one there. Francesca shouted ‘hello’. There was no answer. She went through to the office. Here too the lights were on but the room was empty. Assuming that the guards were doing their rounds in the warehouse itself, Francesca went through to the space where the paintings were kept. This was in darkness but she knew where to find the switches and turned on the lights.
It was empty. The works of art had gone. Francesca fell back, trembling, only saving herself from falling by taking hold of the edge of the table upon which the paintings had been examined after being unpacked. Her first thought was that they had been stolen; her second, that this was impossible, that they had been taken in advance to the museums or perhaps moved to a different area of the warehouse. She recovered enough to stand without the support of the table. She walked forward towards the racks at the back of the warehouse. It was dark. She did not know where to find the switches for the lights. She peered into the gloom. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the poor light. She could see back to the bare wall. There was nothing. The warehouse was empty. All the pictures and sculptures had gone.
She was about to turn away and run to the office when her eyes made out the face of a man standing in the shadow of one of the racks. He was so still that for a moment she thought he must be a statue or a tailor’s dummy. But the eyes moved; they were watching her, like those of a lizard waiting for the best moment to seize and swallow its prey. As she stepped back, he came forward and she recognized the dark features of the man who had been with Andrei when he was sick.
Her first impulse was to turn and run; her second, to behave as if nothing unusual had happened. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you Andrei’s friend?’
He said nothing and Francesca remembered Andrei saying that he spoke little of anything but Chechen and Russian.
‘The paintings,’ she said, gesturing towards the empty spaces. ‘They seem to be gone.’
Again he did not answer, but pointed towards the entrance to the office.
Francesca turned and walked as he had instructed. He followed close behind. They went into the empty office. ‘Is Andrei around?’ she asked.
He pointed to a chair. ‘Sit,’ he said in English.
Francesca glanced towards the telephone but thought it prudent, while his eyes were on her, to
sit down. The Chechen moved behind her. She thought it would suggest alarm and therefore suspicion if she looked to see what he was doing. She heard a crack, and the light dimmed. She turned to see him approaching with flex from a lamp. She leaped to her feet and ran towards the door, but he was there before she was. She backed away. He came forward, no words coming from his mouth and no expression on his face. She came up against a desk and looked towards the window but before she could move further he was upon her. He grabbed her and turned her savagely to face away from him, her arm behind her back.
She felt the wire encircle her wrist. She struck out with her free hand but could not reach him. A moment later, he took hold of that hand too, pulled her back to the chair and pushed her down. She was forced to lean forward as he lifted her arms over the back of the chair and secured them. Then, with a second strand of flex, he bound her ankles to the feet of the chair.
She shrieked for help. He stood and slapped her face. She closed her eyes and was silent; when she opened them again, he had gone. She turned her head as best she could to see if he was standing behind her, then, sensing that she was alone in the office, shouted again. He came back through the door from the warehouse, sauntered across to where she was sitting and slapped her again. In his hand was a reel of packaging tape which he now stuck over her mouth and wound around her face.
Francesca sat, half suffocating as she inhaled air through her narrow nostrils. The Chechen sauntered back to lean his body against a desk and light a cigarette. He watched her. She became calmer and breathed more easily. Slowly, rational thoughts supplanted instinctive terror. If this was Andrei’s friend, then perhaps Andrei would appear. But time passed and Andrei did not appear, and all the while the Chechen watched her, his body propped against the desk, smoking untipped cigarettes. His eyes still had no expression, but their glance had a direction, studying her neck and her breasts and her legs. She felt fear and then, oddly, a certain shame, as if she had somehow invited his lingering looks.
She heard a car. So did the Chechen. He looked towards the door and at the same time took out a gun. They heard the catch of the entrance to the anteroom. He held the gun ready. The inner door opened. Francesca turned her head and saw Andrei. She started to cry. Tears ran down her cheeks as she waited for him to cut her loose and take her in his arms.
Andrei Serotkin glanced at the Chechen, then at Francesca. Neither man spoke. The Chechen’s arm went down but he did not put away his gun. The two men started talking in Russian, words Francesca could only half understand. The Chechen seemed angry, Andrei uneasy. At one point, with an unpleasant leer, the Chechen took the lit cigarette from his mouth with his left hand and offered it to Andrei. Andrei frowned, looked at his watch and shook his head. His right hand went to the inner pocket of his jacket. For a moment Francesca thought that he was going to take out a gun. Instead, he removed a small black case. He turned his back to Francesca, put the case on the desk. When she could see his hands again, one was holding a syringe.
He crossed to where she sat and looked down into her imploring eyes. ‘This will send you to sleep,’ he said in English, his tone indifferent.
She shook her head and tried to speak. He held the syringe up to the light to make sure no air was left in the needle. ‘I am sorry it had to come to this,’ he said quietly, ‘but as I tried to explain a number of times, no individual can be allowed to frustrate the destiny of a nation.’ He moved behind her. ‘Don’t you remember? That afternoon in front of the memorial …’ She felt a sharp pain in the muscle of her neck and at once began to feel drowsy. ‘If you remember, you will understand why things have to end in this way.’ He came round to face her once again and looked down into her eyes. ‘Truth is remembering,’ he whispered. ‘He who has no memory has no life.’ Her muscles grew weak. Her head slumped forward; her eyelids closed. ‘Truth is remembering …’ She felt his hand raise her chin. With a great effort she opened her eyes and looked into his. It seemed, in Francesca’s last moment of consciousness, that Andrei Serotkin smiled.
NINETEEN
Inspector Kessler, because he ate too much on a Sunday, always felt dyspeptic and therefore irritable on a Monday morning. His mood was made worse on the morning of Monday, 21 June by the report he found on his desk from the Leipzig police describing their failure to trace the movements of the Russian, Gerasimov, whenever he left his hotel. It read as if they were proud that one of their former masters could outwit them with such ease. It was particularly humiliating for Kessler because a second report from the BfV passed on by Grohmann described succinctly every move Gerasimov had made from the visit to Bedauer, the Volkswagen dealer, to his dinner in Auerbach’s Cellar with the private detective Manfred Kraus, formerly Generaloberst Franz Riesler of the state security in the DDR.
Clearly, Gerasimov was not a policeman: they had realized that from the start. It was natural enough that he would use old contacts in the Stasi. But what was the relevance of Riesler? Why had he bought the Volkswagen van two weeks before the murder of the Maslyukovs? If the KGB had been responsible, why would Gerasimov need to find this out? Even the BfV had been unable to eavesdrop on the two men’s conversation in Auerbach’s Cellar, but the secretary had overheard what had been said at the office. From this, it appeared that Gerasimov was less interested in the murderer of the Maslyukovs than in the barter of a Volkswagen van for a consignment of shoes! Certainly Grohmann had drawn this conclusion, appending an acid note to the report to the effect that in his view Gerasimov was not an undercover agent but an undercover blackmarketeer.
Kessler looked at his watch. A meeting was scheduled with Grohmann and Gerasimov at ten. It was in the BfV report that Gerasimov on his return to Leipzig had gone straight to the Soviet consulate on Unter den Linden. If he did not come up with anything interesting that morning, Kessler would suggest that the time had come for him to return to Moscow.
Kessler left his office to go down the corridor to get a plastic cup of coffee from the machine. He usually waited until mid-morning, but it was a Monday, and he would need his wits about him to deal with Grohmann as much as Gerasimov.
Dorn passed him in the corridor. ‘Know anything about those paintings, chief?’
‘What paintings?’
‘You know. The big exhibition of Russian rubbish they got planned.’
‘I saw something about it.’
‘Apparently, they’re lost.’
Kessler went back into his office. He looked through the report once again. Could it be that Gerasimov himself was part of the group within the KGB that was involved in the import and export of both icons and shoes? In which case, Gerasimov had probably been sent to do what he could to obstruct them. And they were paying his expenses!
A junior officer, a girl, looked through the door of Kessler’s office. ‘Did you get the message?’
‘What message?’
‘They called while you were getting coffee. You’re wanted urgently upstairs.’
Kessler glanced at his watch. ‘If Herr Grohmann and the Russian turn up, ask them to wait.’
‘Understood.’
Kessler swallowed what remained of his coffee, went back down the corridor and up a single flight of stairs to the office of Berlin’s chief of the criminal police, Kommissar Edgar Rohrbeck. From the look on his superior’s ashen face, Kessler assumed that he too suffered from dyspepsia on a Monday morning. Then he saw that three of his senior colleagues had been called in and he realized that something serious must be going on.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the Kommissar. ‘We have had a call from the New German Foundation to say that the paintings for the Excursus exhibition have disappeared.’
There was a baffled silence from the assembled officers. ‘Disappeared from where?’ asked Kessler.
‘The exhibition is due to open in two weeks’ time. The hanging of the paintings was due to start today. In the meantime, the paintings and sculptures had been stored in a new warehouse at Tegel belonging to Omni Zartfracht. Omni Z
artfracht were due to start delivering the paintings to the galleries at eight o’clock this morning. When they failed to arrive, the organizers called OZF. There was no reply. Two of the organizers drove to Tegel to see what had gone wrong. They found the warehouse deserted, the paintings gone.’
‘It must be a joke,’ said one of Kessler’s colleagues, Inspector Allerding.
‘Or they’ve just been taken to the wrong location,’ said another, Inspector Hasenclever.
‘Or they’re stuck in the traffic,’ said Kessler.
‘Unfortunately,’ said the Kommissar, ‘none of these hypotheses can be true. There was never any intention to move all the works of art in a single day. Moreover, several vans were seen on Sunday at the OZF warehouse. None of these vans is there today.’
‘Isn’t there an office for OZF?’
‘The telephone does not answer. Officers have been sent to investigate.’
‘But they can hardly have been stolen,’ said Allerding.
‘I fear we must work on that assumption,’ said the Kommissar, Rohrbeck.
‘But you can’t fence world-famous paintings like that.’
‘No. But you can threaten to destroy them.’
‘Are they insured?’
‘They are covered by an indemnity by the Federal government.’
‘For how much?’
‘I don’t know, precisely. But their total value may be as much as a billion marks.’
The four officers looked stunned.
‘But no government would pay a ransom,’ said Hasenclever.
‘That remains to be seen,’ said Kommissar Rohrbeck. ‘Our job is to make sure that it does not have to make that choice. I want you all to drop what you’re doing until we find the paintings. I shall take overall command.’ He turned to Kessler. ‘What are you working on?’
‘The Maslyukov case.’
‘Drop it. You’ve wasted too much time on that already. Get out to Tegel. There were over three hundred works of art. They cannot have disappeared without trace.’