The Deceiver (7 page)

Morenz took a deep breath.

“What really hurts,” he said, “is that you could have told me. You didn’t need to let me make such a fool of myself. Because I really did love you.”

Her face was quite contorted. She spat the words.

“
Let
you? You don’t need any help. You
are
a fool. A fat old fool. In bed and out. Now bug off.”

That was when he hit her. Not a punch—an open-handed slap to the side of the face. Something snapped in him, and he hit her. It caught her off balance. He was a big man, and the blow knocked her to the floor.

What the blond man was thinking of, Morenz later could never decide. Morenz was about to leave when the pimp reached inside his jacket. It seemed he was armed. Morenz pulled his PPK from his waistband. He thought the safety catch was on. It should have been. He wanted to scare the pimp into raising his arms and letting him go. But the pimp went on pulling his pistol out. Morenz squeezed the trigger. Dusty it may have been, but the Walther went off.

On the shooting range Morenz could not have hit a barn door. And he hadn’t been on the range for years. Real marksmen practice almost daily. It was beginner’s luck. The single bullet hit the pimp right in the heart at fifteen feet. The man jerked, an expression of disbelief on his face. But nervous reaction or not, his right arm kept coming up, clutching his Beretta. Morenz fired again. Renate chose that moment to rise from the floor. The second slug caught her in the back of the head. The padded door had swung shut during the altercation; not a sound had left the room.

Morenz stood for several minutes looking at the two bodies. He felt numb, slightly dizzy. Eventually, he left the room and pulled the door closed behind him. He did not lock it. He was about to step over the winter clothes in the hall when it occurred to him, even in his bemused state, to wonder why they were there at this time of year. He looked into the coat closet and noticed that the rear panel of the closet appeared to be loose. He pulled the loose panel toward him. …

Bruno Morenz spent another fifteen minutes in the apartment, then left. He took with him the videotape of himself, the groceries, the flowers, and a black canvas grip that did not belong to him. He could not later explain why he had done that. Two miles from Hahnwald he dropped the groceries, wine, and flowers into separate garbage cans by the roadside. Then he drove for almost an hour, threw the videotape of himself and his gun into the Rhine from the Severin Bridge, turned out of Cologne, deposited the canvas grip, and finally made his way home to Porz. When he entered the sitting room at half-past nine, his wife made no comment.

“My trip with the Herr Direktor has been postponed,” he said. “I’ll be leaving very early on Monday morning instead.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” she said.

He sometimes thought he could come in from the office of an evening and say, “Today I popped down to Bonn and shot Chancellor Kohl,” and she would still say, “Oh, that’s nice.”

She eventually prepared him a meal. It was uneatable, so he did not eat it.

“I’m going out for a drink,” he said. She took another chocolate, offered one to Lutz, and they both went on watching television.

He got drunk that night. Drinking alone. He noticed that his hands were shaking and that he kept breaking out in sweat. He thought he had a summer cold coming on. Or the flu. He was not a psychiatrist, and there was none available to him. So no one told him he was heading for a complete nervous breakdown.

That Saturday, Major Vanavskaya arrived at Berlin-Schönefeld and was driven in an unmarked car to KGB headquarters, East Berlin. She checked at once on the whereabouts of the man she was stalking. He was in Cottbus, heading for Dresden, surrounded by army men, moving in a military convoy and out of her reach. On Sunday he would reach Karl-Marx-Stadt, Monday Zwickau, and Tuesday Jena. Her surveillance mandate did not cover East Germany. It could be extended, but that would require paperwork. Always the damned paperwork, she thought angrily.

The following day, Sam McCready arrived back in Germany and spent the morning conferring with the head of Bonn Station. In the evening he took delivery of the BMW car and the paperwork and drove to Cologne. He lodged at the Holiday Inn out at the airport, where he took and prepaid a room for two nights.

Before dawn on Monday, Bruno Morenz rose, long before his family, and left quietly. He arrived at the Holiday Inn about seven on that bright, early September morning and joined McCready in his room. The Englishman ordered breakfast for both from room service, and when the waiter had gone, he spread out a huge motoring map of Germany, West and East.

“We’ll do the route first,” he said. “Tomorrow morning you leave here at four
A.M.
It’s a long drive, so take it easy, in stages. Take the E35 here past Bonn, Limburg, and Frankfurt. It links to the E41 and E45, past Würzburg and Nuremburg. North of Nuremburg, pull left on the E51 past Bayreuth and up to the border. That’s your crossing point, near Hof. The Saale Bridge border station. It’s no more than a six-hour drive. You want to be there about eleven. I’ll be there ahead of you, watching from cover. Are you feeling all right?”

Morenz was sweating, even with his jacket off.

“It’s hot in here,” he said. McCready turned up the air conditioning.

“After the border, drive straight north to the Hermsdorfer Kreuz. Turn left onto the E40 heading back toward the West. At Mellingen, leave the Autobahn and head into Weimar. Inside the town, find Highway Seven and head west again. Four miles west of the town, on the right of the road, is a lay-by.”

McCready produced a large blown-up photograph of that section of the road, taken from a high-flying aircraft, but at an angle, for the aircraft had been inside Bavarian airspace. Morenz could see the small lay-by—some cottages, even the trees that shaded the patch of gravel designated as his first rendezvous. Carefully and meticulously, McCready ran him through the procedure he should follow and, if the first pass aborted, how and where he should spend the night and where and when to attend the second, backup rendezvous with Pankratin. At midmorning they broke for coffee.

At nine that morning, Frau Popovic arrived for work at the apartment in Hahnwald. She was the cleaning lady, a Yugoslav immigrant worker who came every day from nine until eleven. She had her own keys to the front door and the apartment door. She knew Fräulein Heimendorf liked to sleep late, so she always let herself in and started with the rooms other than the bedroom so that her employer could rise at half-past ten. Then she would tidy the lady’s bedroom. The locked room at the end of the passage, she never entered. She had been told—and had accepted—that it was a small room used for storing furniture. She had no idea what her employer did for a living.

That morning, she started with the kitchen, then did the hall and the passage. She was vacuum-cleaning the passage right up to the door at the end when she noticed what she thought was a brown silk slip lying on the floor at the base of the locked door. She tried to pick it up, but it was not a silk slip. It was a large brown stain, quite dry and hard, that seemed to have come from under the door. She tut-tutted at the extra work she would have to scrub it off, then went to get a bucket of water and a brush. She was working on her hands and knees when she kicked the door. To her surprise it moved. She tried the handle and found it was not locked.

The stain was still resisting her attempts to scrub it off, and she thought it might happen again, so she opened the door to see what might be leaking. Seconds later, she was running screaming down the stairs to hammer at the door of the ground-floor apartment and arouse the bewildered retired bookseller who lived there. He did not go upstairs, but he did call the 110 emergency number and ask for the police.

The call was logged in the Police
Präsidium
on the Waidmarkt at 9:51. The first to arrive, according to the unvarying routine of all German police forces, was a
Streifenwagen
, or patrol car, with two uniformed policemen. Their job was to establish whether an offense had indeed been committed, into which category it fell, and then to alert the appropriate departments. One of the men stayed downstairs with Frau Popovic, who was being comforted by the bookseller’s elderly wife, and the other went up. He touched nothing, just went down the passage and looked through the half-open door, gave a whistle of amazement, and came back down to use the bookseller’s phone. He did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that this one was for Homicide.

According to procedure, he first called the emergency doctor—in Germany, always supplied by the fire brigade. Then he called the Police
Präsidium
and asked for the
Leitstelle
, the Violent Crime switchboard. He told the operator where he was and what he had found and asked for two more uniformed men. The message went up to the
Mordkommission
or Murder Squad, always known as “First K” on the tenth and eleventh floors of the ugly, functional, green-concrete building covering all of one side of the Waidmarkt square. The Director of First K assigned a commissar and two assistants. Records showed later that they arrived at the Hahnwald apartment at 10:40
A.M.,
just as the doctor was leaving.

He had taken a closer look than the uniformed officer, felt for signs of life, touched nothing else, and left to make his formal report. The commissar, whose name was Peter Schiller, met him on the steps. Schiller knew him.

“What have we got?” he asked. It was not the doctor’s job to do a post-mortem, simply to establish the fact of death.

“Two bodies. One male, one female. One clothed, one naked.”

“Cause of death?” asked Schiller.

“Gunshot wounds, I’d say. The paramedic will tell you.”

“Time?”

“I’m not the pathologist. Oh, one to three days, I would say. Rigor mortis is well established. That’s unofficial, by the way. I’ve done my job. I’m off.”

Schiller went upstairs with one assistant. The other stayed below to try and get statements from Frau Popovic and the bookseller. Neighbors began to gather up and down the street. There were now three official cars outside the apartment house.

Like his uniformed colleague, Schiller gave a low whistle when he saw the contents of the master bedroom. Renate Heimendorf and her pimp were still where they had fallen, the head of the near-naked woman lying close to the door, under whose sill the blood had leaked outside. The pimp was across the room, slumped with his back to the TV set, the expression of surprise still on his face. The TV set was off. The bed with the black silk sheets still bore the indentations of two bodies that had once lain there.

Treading carefully, Schiller flipped open a number of the closets and drawers.

“A hooker,” he said. “Call girl, whatever. Wonder if they knew downstairs. We’ll ask. In fact, we’ll need all the tenants. Start to get a list of names.”

The assistant commissar, Wiechert, was about to go when he said, “I’ve seen the man somewhere before. … Hoppe. Bernhard Hoppe. Bank robbery, I think. A hard man.”

“Oh, good,” said Schiller ironically, “that’s all we need. A gangland killing.”

There were two telephone extensions in the flat, but Schiller, even with gloved hands, used neither. They might have prints. He went down and borrowed the bookseller’s phone. Before that, he posted two uniformed men at the door of the house, another in the hall, and the fourth outside the apartment door.

He called his superior, Rainer Hartwig, Director of the Murder Squad, and told him there might be gangland ramifications. Hartwig decided he had better tell his own superior, the president of the Crime Office, the
Kriminalamt
, known as the KA. If Wiechert was right and the body on the floor was a gangster, then experts from other divisions besides Murder Squad—robbery and racketeering, for example—would have to be consulted.

In the interim Hartwig sent down the
Erkennungsdienst
, the forensic team, one photographer and four fingerprint men. The apartment would be theirs and theirs alone for hours to come; until, in fact, every last print and scraping, every fiber and particle that could be of interest, had been removed for analysis. Hartwig also detached eight more men from their duties. There was a lot of door-knocking to be done, the search for witnesses who had seen a man or men come or go.

The log would later show that the forensic men arrived at 11:31
A.M.
and stayed for almost eight hours.

At that hour Sam McCready put down his second cup of coffee and folded up the map. He had taken Morenz carefully through both rendezvous with Pankratin in the East, shown him the latest photograph of the Soviet general, and explained that the man would be in the baggy fatigues of a Russian army corporal with a forage cap shading his face and driving a GAZ jeep. That was the way the Russian had set it up.

“Unfortunately, he thinks he will be meeting me. We must just hope he recognizes you from Berlin and makes the pass anyway. Now, to the car. It’s down there in the parking lot. We’ll go for a drive after lunch, let you get used to it.

“It’s a BMW sedan, black, with Würzburg registration plates. That’s because you’re a Rhinelander by birth, but now live and work in Würzburg. I’ll give you your full cover story and backup papers later. The car with those number plates actually exists. It
is
a black BMW sedan.

“But this one is the Firm’s car. It has made several crossings of the Saale Bridge border point, so hopefully they’ll be accustomed to it. The drivers have always been different because it’s a Company car. It has always driven to Jena, apparently to visit the Zeiss works there. And it has always been clean. But this time there is a difference. Under the battery shelf there is a flat compartment, just about invisible unless you really look for it. It is big enough to take the book you will receive from Smolensk.”

(On a need-to-know basis, Morenz had never known Pankratin’s real name. He did not even know the man had risen to Major-General or was now based in Moscow. The last time he had seen him, Pankratin was a colonel in East Berlin, code-name Smolensk.)