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  A Patriot in Berlin

  A Novel

  Piers Paul Read

  It has been hard for outsiders to realize that Russian national feeling is a spiritual emotion largely detached from the mundane things of life, that for centuries past Russia has meant for her people much more than just a country to be loved and defended: ‘Russia’ was more a state of mind, a secular ideal, a sacred idea, an object of almost religious belief – unfathomable by the mind, unmeasurable by the yardstick of rationality.

  Tibor Szamuely: The Russian Tradition

  PART ONE

  1991

  30 August

  ONE

  The neighbour on one side was an old woman living alone. She was deaf and remembered nothing. The house on the other was divided into flats. The owners were questioned when they returned that evening. One, a middle-aged spinster, remembered music, loud choral music, in the early hours of the morning ten days or so before. She had telephoned the police to complain. Some time later the music had stopped and she had fallen asleep.

  A cassette remained in the tape deck. None of the team investigating the deaths could decipher the Cyrillic script on the label so Kessler, the senior detective, played the tape for a moment or two – Slavonic church music, undoubtedly the music that had kept the woman awake. He turned up the volume, taking care not to superimpose his fingerprints on any that might be there already.

  The sergeant, Dorn, put his hands to his ears. ‘Why so loud?’

  Kessler said nothing. Instead, he hit the walls of the large living room with his fist. The music must have been played at full volume to have woken the woman next door: the windows had been closed, the walls were thick, and the houses on this stretch of Dubrowstrasse were at least fifty metres apart – large Teutonic villas built at the turn of the century in the heyday of the German empire.

  ‘They go for a million marks, houses like this,’ said Dorn, looking around at the large rooms with bare walls. ‘And when the government moves here from Bonn, they’ll double again. I bet the children of the woman next door can’t wait for her to pass on. She’s squatting on a fortune …’

  Why so loud? Kessler stopped the tape and switched off the system. To lose the sound of the shot that killed the man? No. His body lay in the hall at the bottom of the stairs: he must have been killed as they entered. To smother the screams of the woman? Surgical tape had covered her mouth. Stooping over the body tied to the chair, and studying her face through a magnifying glass, Kessler could see traces of the white adhesive above and below the edge of the tape, and on the sticky side, dangling loose on her chin, several small black hairs from her upper lip lay on top of one another, suggesting that it had been removed on several occasions. To let her talk? Or scream?

  Kessler stepped back because of the stench. A robust Berliner who had seen many a corpse in his time, he was shaken all the same by the sight of this woman’s body. She wore a light cotton dress, but in her writhing the dress had torn, rucked and twisted to uncover most of her body, and the folds were now brittle where the sweat had dried. Sweat had matted the strands of dark hair that had fallen over her face and now seemed glued to her skin. There were black stripes where ropes bound her wrists and ankles, and discoloration where her back and buttocks pressed against the chair. There were patches on the upholstered seat, too, that gave off a pungent odour distinct from that of rotting flesh; but there seemed to be no blood on her body, on the red weals where they had burned her skin, almost certainly with cigarettes, so that it now looked as if she had suffered from smallpox or bubonic plague.

  There were shreds of tobacco on the floor. Kessler crouched and picked one up with a pair of tweezers. It was dark and finely cut, probably from a Turkish or a Bulgarian cigarette. He put the shred into a small transparent plastic bag and the bag into his pocket.

  The woman’s head lolled right back, the open eyes gazing at the ceiling. From the lines and the complexion, Kessler estimated that she was at least forty, but attractive in a swarthy, Levantine way. The face was untouched, but the sight of it disturbed Kessler more than the marks on her skin – particularly the way in which her features were set in an expression of an agony that could all too easily be taken for rapture.

  ‘Did they fuck her?’ asked Dorn.

  Kessler turned away. ‘Tied like that? And with her clothes on?’

  ‘Shall I look in her mouth?’

  ‘Leave that to them.’ Kessler nodded towards the team of forensic technicians.

  ‘How did she die?’

  Kessler pointed to a small circular bruise on the back of her neck. ‘An injection, I’d say. Probably cyanide.’

  ‘To save a bullet?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Not just cruel but stingy too.’

  Kessler was called to the telephone in the hall. The police post at Schlachtensee had received a complaint from a flat on Dubrowstrasse at 3.32 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 20 August 1991. A patrol car had called at the house in question. A man had come to the door, had apologized and had promised to turn off the music. He had been tall, in his late 30s or early 40s, and had spoken German but the officers had thought that he might be a foreigner, pehaps a Yugoslav or a Russian.

  This information helped Kessler establish the approximate time of death for the two corpses: certainly, it smelt about right. It also added weight to his hunch that neither the victims nor the murderers were German. The dead man in the hall had the kind of pudgy face and potato nose that Kessler associated with Slavs; and the woman’s eyes and cheekbones, her black hair and sallow skin, suggested a touch of Tartar blood. The tape label was in Russian, and most of the books in the house were printed in Cyrillic script.

  Clearly, they had passed themselves off as Germans. The bills for gas and electricity that he found in a drawer were addressed to Hermann Ludwig, and in the same bureau was writing paper, some headed Hermann und Klara Ludwig with the address on Dubrowstrasse. It seemed likely, despite the absence of pictures, that the large rooms on the ground floor had been used as a gallery. There was little furniture, and spotlights pointed at rectangles of discoloration on the bare walls.

  Only the kitchen, and one of the bedrooms upstairs, looked lived-in: the double bed was unmade and dirty dishes remained on the draining board of the sink. Kessler, in the kitchen, wrinkled his nose at the new odour of rotting rubbish.

  ‘Phew,’ said Dorn at his elbow.

  ‘Russische Gemütlichkeit,’ said Kessler.

  ‘You think they are Russians?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mafia?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Come back, DDR, all is forgiven’.

  Kessler smiled. Like many West Berliners, he looked back with some nostalgia to the days when the wall had made it easy to control crime in their half of the city. As a boy, living in Wilmersdorf, he had watched the US aeroplanes fly supplies to the Tempelhof to break the Russian blockade; and less than two weeks before, when watching the attempted coup in Moscow on the television news, he had felt a twinge of that old angst; but by and large, life had been good in the divided city, certainly less complicated for a policeman than it was today with whole quarters of the city inhabited by Turks, Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and Russians – even Vietname
se and Ethiopians – each with their own network of criminals and racketeers.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked Dorn as they returned from the kitchen into the hall.

  ‘Could be theft with trimmings …’

  ‘Theft of what?’

  ‘Paintings?’

  Kessler looked around. ‘And the trimmings?’

  ‘The woman.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not? A little bit of what you fancy. Particularly if you’ve got to lose her anyway.’

  Kessler looked uncertain. ‘A professional thief wants to be in and out as quickly as he can.’

  ‘Usually, yes.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to hang around listening to music or torturing women.’

  ‘Unless the thief happens to be a pervert …’

  ‘I don’t think he did it for fun.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because every now and then he took the tape from her mouth.’

  ‘To kiss her?’ Dorn laughed.

  Kessler remained grave. ‘To let her speak. To give her a chance to tell them what they wanted to know.’

  ‘And did she?’

  Kessler hesitated. He thought of the look on her face. ‘Yes, in the end, I think she probably did.’

  Dorn shook his head. ‘They can be really nasty, these Russian mafiosi.’

  ‘They’re certainly learning.’

  ‘Well, so long as they only kill one another,’ said Dorn, ‘I don’t really care.’

  PART TWO

  1992

  September–December

  TWO

  Nikolai Gerasimov looked down from the office of General Savchenko in the Lubyanka at the bare plinth in the middle of Dzerzhinski Square. Where the statue of Felix Dzerzhinski had once stood, there remained only a stump. Nothing had yet replaced the founding father of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police.

  It was an unusually warm, even sultry, September day. The Lenin Hills were hidden behind the haze over Moscow. There was a move to call them the Sparrow Hills once again. Gerasimov had no view on the matter. He was neutral, even indifferent. Indeed, if anything had surprised him over the past months, it was the discovery of how little he cared when Marx and Lenin had followed Dzerzhinski into the dustbin of history. He had been an enthusiastic member first of the Komsomol and then the Party, but when President Yeltsin had suspended the Party with a stroke of a pen, his only thought had been: Will I lose my job? Will they abolish the KGB?

  Both were unnecessary anxieties. Without the Party, the secret police became the only effective means for governing the country; and Gerasimov had all the necessary qualities for preferment by the new regime. He was young, fit, good-looking, and spoke flawless English and German. His father was a retired army general, his wife the daughter of a physicist. Above all, he had that indifference to ideology, now called ‘professionalism’, that qualified him as an officer in the new security service of the Russian Federation, and had led to a request for his secondment from Service A for special duties under General Savchenko in the Twelfth Department.

  Others had been sacked to placate Yeltsin and the democratic forces. Officers responsible for the nastier measures taken against the dissidents, had gone. So too had those known by Western intelligence agencies as the authors of some of the old KGB’s more unsavoury operations; and a number suspected of aiding the KGB commander Kryuchkov in planning the coup.

  Gerasimov’s superior, General Savchenko, who now came back into his office, was secure. Posing for ten years as the London correspondent of a Moscow magazine, he had picked up some British mannerisms and habits of thought – a certain tolerance of eccentricity and aversion to dogma. He had helped brief Gorbachev before his first visit to London, and when drunk would boast that he had played cupid for Mikhail Sergeyevich and Mrs Thatcher. Now a senior officer on the staff of the Twelfth Department of the First Chief Directorate, one of the few sections which still had offices in the Lubyanka, he was known to be close to Vadim Bakatin, chief of the KGB since the coup.

  Savchenko was not uncritical of the actions of the new regime. He had confided to Gerasimov that it had been a mistake to let such dangerous men loose on the world with only a small pension in inflationary times; and now he had been given the task of ‘damage limitation’ (he had used the English phrase to Gerasimov to describe his role), restructuring or closing networks that the sacked officers had controlled, and doing what he could to recover the large sums in foreign currency that they had been allocated by the KGB to finance their operations abroad.

  ‘Enjoying the view?’ he asked as Gerasimov turned away from the window.

  ‘I was wondering who would replace Dzerzhinski on the plinth.’

  The general rolled his eyes and sighed, as if to say: ‘Don’t start on that.’ He was a squat, heavy man in a crumpled, shiny suit who, before the coup, had been trying to cut down his smoking to a pack a day. Now he was back to three.

  ‘Save your energy,’ he said to Gerasimov. ‘Dzerzhinski is dead. We have enough trouble with the living.’

  Savchenko threw the fat file that he had brought into the office onto his new desk. Both men sat down, Savchenko behind a battery of telephones on his desk, the most prestigious of them, the one with the hammer-and-sickle emblem which had connected him directly to the Central Committee, now a museum piece. Gerasimov faced him on a comfortable leather chair. The wood of the desk and the furniture matched the yellow beech veneer of the walls. The door to the office was upholstered with purple plastic, as was common in Russia, to preserve privacy by muffling the sound – a pretence in the past, thought Gerasimov, since there had been microphones hidden behind the wooden veneer. And now? The microphones were probably still there, but he doubted whether anyone could be bothered to listen.

  ‘Orlov,’ said Savchenko, patting the file on his desk. ‘Andrei Orlov. Captain. Did you know him?’

  ‘No.’

  Savchenko gave a quick, penetrating look at Gerasimov – not mistrustful so much as thorough. ‘Are you sure? He was at the Foreign Intelligence School?’

  Gerasimov blushed at having answered so quickly. He thought back to his days at the Yurlovo. There had been a Gennady Orlov in his year, but he could remember no Andrei Orlov. He shook his head. ‘I don’t remember him.’

  ‘No, well, he is a few years older.’ Savchenko opened the file. ‘And you never met him here, in the canteen, or socially, with some of your friends?’

  ‘Not that I can recall.’

  ‘There are a number of Orlovs … It is a common name.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I know Gennady Orlov …’

  ‘But not an Andrei?’

  ‘No.’

  Savchenko seemed satisfied. He looked down at the contents of the file and scratched the skin beneath the tousled hair on his head. ‘This Orlov was one of our best men.’ He paused. His breathing was wheezy. ‘For most of his career he was with the First Chief Directorate. He did a spell in Africa for the Ninth Department, then in Washington for the First, and then worked in Moscow on the Washington desk. Two years ago, he was seconded to work in the Second Chief Directorate under General Khrulev. Khrulev, as you may know, committed suicide after the coup.’

  ‘I had heard,’ said Gerasimov.

  ‘He, too, was one of our best men. A good comrade. Zealous … too zealous. A true believer at a time when …’ Pause. Wheeze. ‘At a time when it is prudent to retain a little scepticism … about everything and anything.’ He looked up at Gerasimov. ‘Loyalty to one’s country, of course, and to the government of the day, but not to one’s own convictions. Not to a cause.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Professionalism … professionalism …’ Savchenko repeated the word as if he was trying to inculcate that quality in himself as much as in Gerasimov.

  He lit another cigarette. ‘You know, with Kryuchkov in prison, and Khrulev dead, and most of Khrulev’s people sacked or in disgrace, it is difficult to pick up the trail of what they we
re doing just from the files …’ He paused and wheezed and flicked through the papers.

  ‘Were they involved in ongoing operations?’ asked Gerasimov.

  Savchenko gave a sigh. ‘Not according to the files. About two years ago, Khrulev put Orlov in charge of a particular operation in Germany. Khrulev had at one time served with the Eleventh Department and so had good contacts in Berlin.’

  ‘The operation …?’

  ‘Kryuchkov had told Khrulev to stop the illegal export of icons. It was big business, as you know, but no one had thought much of it; in fact many of our own people packed the odd icon in their suitcase when they went abroad to get hold of some extra currency. It was a perk that went with the job. But Kryuchkov disapproved of it – squandering the national heritage, cheating the state of foreign earnings, that kind of thing. Orlov was considered something of an expert …’ He pushed the file over to Gerasimov.

  Gerasimov looked first at the mugshot of a handsome, clean-shaven man with strong features and plenty of wavy brown hair.

  ‘As you can see,’ Savchenko said, ‘Orlov’s background is unusual. He is the son of Anatoly Orlov.’

  ‘Anatoly Sergeyevich? The painter?’

  ‘Precisely. Brezhnev’s favourite artist.’

  Gerasimov nodded. He remembered trudging round art galleries as a child, looking up at the enormous canvases painted by Anatoly Orlov portraying triumphant workers with square jaws and grim faces, clutching red banners against a radiant sky.

  ‘They not only had an apartment in Moscow,’ Savchenko went on, ‘but also a dacha in Zhukovka, a gift from the Central Committee. Anatoly Sergeyevich held the Order of Lenin and any number of state prizes. His paintings are in every gallery in the Soviet Union.’ He laughed, and then coughed, and then laughed again. ‘They were still there, at any rate, when I last went into the gallery … but they may not be there now.’

  Gerasimov looked down at the file. ‘Andrei Orlov was not a painter?’