‘Even so, he found a way of side-stepping Mr Frenzel,’ said Irina, serving Anselm some salad. It was crisp and fresh. ‘I only found out by chance and he asked me not to say anything… and I never have done, until now’
A second phone appeared on Colonel Brack’s desk: one day it wasn’t there; the next it was. She was never to answer it. He’d obviously installed a secure line — evidently part of some covert operation. In itself that wasn’t out of the ordinary, so Irina didn’t give it a second thought, not until the day she dropped an earring. Irina’s office was part of Colonel Brack’s, a small area separated by an arch without a door. She was on her knees behind her desk patting the carpet when she heard Colonel Brack enter his side of the room. Moments later a phone rang…
‘He let it ring for a long time and for some reason I couldn’t move.” said Irina. ‘I just knew he was looking into my corner, checking if I was there… and then he finally picked up the receiver and said, “This is the Dentist.”‘
‘The Dentist?’ repeated Anselm, with a light cough.
‘Yes,’ replied Irina. ‘He said, “I’ll come immediately” And that’s when I stood up. He swung round and looked at me as if I had a gun in my hand. I’d never seen him look so smart. Normally he wore his uniform or a limp suit, but this time he was well turned out, as if he was off to a wedding.’
‘When was this, Irina?’
‘Towards the end of the Polana operation, November nineteen eighty-two. The whole thing was wound up the same week. The phone vanished overnight.’
‘How do you know he was side-stepping Frenzel?’
‘Because he asked me not to tell him about the Dentist. He said it was an operation unrelated to the joint SB/Stasi mandate… then he was off… presumably to meet whoever it was that had just been on the line.’
Anselm couldn’t order his thoughts properly. The caller had almost certainly been John; Brack had been John’s legitimate contact, a voice on the end of a telephone line. Anselm couldn’t get the measure of the surprise because Irina had returned to something they’d touched on earlier: Frenzel’s intuition that Brack had met Roza in the past.
‘Mr Frenzel is not a nice man,’ she said, without apparent understatement, ‘but he’s clever. He has a nose for things. And he’d sniffed something out of Brack’s past. After that slip where he’d used her first name, Mr Frenzel was always making smutty allusions, insinuating that there’d been some lost love in Brack’s life before he’d joined the service. I won’t repeat the kind of disgusting things he used to say.
‘You don’t need to. I can well imagine.’
‘Maybe that’s why I stopped him shooting himself,’ said Irina, as if finding a new angle on to her own behaviour. ‘I suppose I felt sorry for him. Don’t misunderstand me, but he was like a monk — early to work, ascetic, dedicated, diligent, one thing on his mind…’
Anselm didn’t quite nod in recognition, but he coughed again, trying to wave on the epithets, wondering whether to let slip a few details about life at Larkwood. He opted for mute submission; the subject was just too big.
‘… self-sacrificing, unswerving… but for all that he was hollow His emotions had been poured out somewhere… that’s why I found him such a frightening man. He was all ideas, simple ideas.’ without feeling… cold… hard… terribly, terribly sure about everything… about what he was doing and why But as far as I could see, he felt nothing. He used to look straight through me. I was there for a purpose, not as a person. He was like that with everyone… they had a function rather than any value. For that reason I couldn’t imagine anyone loving him. The stuff that love latches on to just wasn’t there, he was like a ladder without rungs; somehow he stayed together without falling apart, but I had no idea what kept him upright.’
She paused to clear the plates and Anselm made a flap, trying to help, but there wasn’t much to be done. Irina’s back was towards him again. She’d switched on the kettle and was spooning out coffee.
‘You know, I met his wife, once,’ she said, still following the stream of her previous reflections.
‘Brack was married?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was she like?’
‘I only met her once. There’d been a final party after all the shredding and this overweight brunette on the other side of the room kept giggling at someone’s jokes, shoving his shoulder and spilling her drink. All I knew was that she was married to some top brass who was a son of even higher brass. Then Mr Frenzel came over and whispered that she’d once been Mrs Brack.
‘Couldn’t take him any more, he’d said, laughing. Who could? She’d divorced him for… get a hold of this — Kyrie eleison — a go-getting careerist higher up the SB ladder. The best part: the new hubby’s father had been stumping Brack’s promotions ever since the second wedding. Does it get any better than that?
‘Mr Frenzel had done his homework,’ said Irina, her face soured by the reproduction of his voice and manners. She came to the table and laid the cups of coffee between them. ‘But he didn’t know everything and that bothered him. He hadn’t found out why Polana was so important to Colonel Brack, or why Roza appeared to be significant. It frustrated him. He liked to know things, to have information on people, no matter how insignificant, but especially about their mistakes. He used to say that mistakes were currency for the future — ’ she slowed a fraction, and Anselm instantly realised that this was part of Frenzel’s continued hold on her; he had something jingling, deep in his pocket: her past — ‘that mistakes never go away and their value always goes up… and he knew that Polana wasn’t what it seemed. That’s why he cleaned the file himself. He reckoned Colonel Brack had made some big mistake.’
In August 1989 the Stasi, unhappy about the scale of shredding, had arrived with a truck to collect all the joint operations material — a concession made by some high-ups who hadn’t cared where it all went anyway Sensing an opportunity Frenzel had let them take Roza’s interrogations, which should, by rights, have been returned to the main SB archive. ‘Your right hand shouldn’t know what your left is doing, isn’t that how it goes?’ he’d said with a smile, holding up most of the contents lifted from the Polana file. ‘Everything comes down to give and take, doesn’t it, my girl?’ Frenzel might not have known everything about Colonel Brack’s past but he knew enough to make an investment.
‘When I found Colonel Brack at his desk with that gun in his mouth,’ said Irina, ‘I think he’d just found out that Roza’s file had gone missing. Now I understand what must have been going through his mind. He’d glimpsed the future… that someone, someday would uncover those executions, that they’d go to Roza with questions, that all he’d have to rely on was her willingness to protect an informer.’ She looked up suddenly at Anselm, smiling broadly with amusement in her eyes. ‘To think… I saved his life so he could stand on trial.’
The plastic clock ticked, slicing up the quiet between them. It was dark outside now Anselm noticed that there’d been no gunfire. The Afghans had either called it a day or their nemesis was planning a surprise attack. There hadn’t been a sound from the living room, and no used plate had been brought back into the kitchen. It was as though Anselm and Irina were completely alone. The sensation prompted him to push the boat out.
‘Irina, did you ever read Roza’s file?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
She leaned her cheek on the back of her hand, eyes cast down. One finger drew a circle on the Formica table, going round and round. ‘She was a woman, like me. I wondered why we were so different… what it was I lacked.’