too much interest.
‘You were friends?’
Liebl was smiling again.
‘We talked,’ George said cautiously, ‘about the army.’
He could hardly deny it.
‘Did you talk about the vodka?’
This time George’s stomach lurched. He had been selling cases of the stuff on the black market for over a year. It wasn’t the sort of transgression which interested Werner as long as he got his regular supplies. George had always assumed that he was taking a cut from every hustle which went on in the factory. Everyone had some kind of scam working for them, and it was easy to forget that it was a crime until you were caught.
‘Vodka?’
He was playing for time, but he knew he had been caught, and looking at Liebl he noticed that the curve of his fat lips wasn’t a smile at all, merely a reflex expressing some kind of pain or stress. Realising this, he understood that the man was playing with him, the eyes gleaming through the folds of flesh as cruel as a cat.
‘The vodka that the Poles bring you,’ Liebl said, ‘costs less than half the stuff you put on the books. Everyone knows that.’
That was the way things were, George wanted to reply, but he knew by now that whatever was going on was also something to do with the way things were. The truth was that the canteen swindles had been going on before he arrived and they were a part of his everyday routine. He suspected that Liebl knew this already, and he probably knew that most of the products on George’s books ended up on the black market or in the kitchens of the production committee – two days earlier the manager himself had collected half a dozen bottles – but for some reason they had decided to throw him to Liebl.
‘They say you’re a good worker,’ Liebl continued, ‘and I don’t want to charge you with anything.’
So all this had merely been a preamble to his real purpose, a way of letting George know that he had to give Liebl what he wanted. The question which remained in his mind was why the man hadn’t simply asked for a few bottles. Werner had understood the limits. If his replacement was greedy it might cause problems.
‘What do you want?’ George asked.
‘We want you to do a job.’
Whatever it was, George thought, he wanted nothing to do with it.
‘I have a job,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want a transfer.’
‘We don’t want to transfer you.’
For the first time it occurred to George that Liebl wasn’t simply a security officer.
‘Who is we?’
‘Stasi.’
At last he understood. This was the way that state security operated, and he would have to do whatever it was they wanted.
At the beginning it was easier than he would ever have imagined. Liebl wanted to know about the black market, where the products came from, where they went and who handled them. Most of it he already knew. The rest he could have found out by observing what went on around the factory. George laid down ground rules. He refused to talk about his colleagues or about his mother and her job translating for Soviet officials.
‘I respect that,’ Liebl said. ‘We are only concerned with the vandals who are undermining the State.’
As time went on George never trusted Liebl any more than he had that first morning, but before long he felt at ease. Liebl, he understood, wrote exhaustive reports about everything he learnt, yet little or nothing seemed to change. He had half expected some of the traders he knew to disappear, perhaps a few transfers or arrests, but things at the factory went on much as they had always done. Liebl’s questions came to seem like a bit of a joke, a sort of monthly quota with which he filled his notebook. Improbably, Liebl turned out to be a boxing fan, with an encyclopaedic memory for lists of fighters from Poland, the Ukraine and Cuba. Somehow he had managed to see films of fighters like Muhammed Ali, and he revelled in describing every blow in famous matches like the Thriller in Manila. When he did this his arms flailed, his little eyes gleamed and he gasped for breath. After a while George realised that he actually liked the man, and it would have been hard for him to imagine the rage and contempt he would come to feel in Liebl’s presence.
On the other hand, as he told Valentin when they began talking about what to do with the Levitan, if you wanted to sell a painting of dubious origins and ownership, it wouldn’t be hard to find interested parties, but the problem was avoiding buyers who were police informers or simple thieves. If Liebl was well disposed he could send them to a buyer who was safe and would keep his mouth shut. Valentin’s response was to urge him to see Liebl.
‘So he was Stasi. That’s much better. He will have to be quiet.’
George shrugged. Up until the moment he mentioned Liebl he had had no intention of speaking to him ever again, but when he thought about his life behind the Wall it seemed to have taken place in another world. Perhaps it was the same for the Stasi. He could still recognise people who had been in the same trade as Liebl, and it was as if, from the moment of the Wende, they had begun to shrink, changing subtly into ordinary individuals. There were so many of them, in fact, that most of the time no one would guess. In any case Liebl had never forced him to do anything. He had simply opened the door to the maze. George’s wife Radka was the only person who knew every detail of the tasks he had performed for Liebl, but during one of the worst periods in their relationship she had accused him of using the fat man as a lightning rod for his own guilt. The remark had provoked his anger, partly because he already knew it to be true. Avoiding Liebl would make no more sense than avoiding the steps of the Gethsemanekirche in Berlin, which was where he had heard about the death of a woman he had loved.
‘Perhaps it is time I saw him again,’ he told Valentin after seeing the Levitan.
George hadn’t actually laid eyes on the man then for at least half a dozen years, but he knew where to find him. Liebl was still in the security business, and he was still based in the centre of Prenzlauer Berg, but now he ran a firm supplying bouncers to the nightclubs that littered the district. On the same afternoon that George saw Valentin’s painting he decided to take the leap, to try to lay at least one of his ghosts to rest by talking to Liebl.
He parked near the KulturBrauerei, the old Prenzlauer brewery which had hastily been converted into a cultural centre. The factory where he had worked with Liebl was only a stone’s throw away, but it was now deserted with a web of scaffolding covering the building while it was being converted into something else. This was how it was all over the east of the city. More than six years after the Wall came down the noise of drilling and hammering, the smell of paint, scaffolding and a kind of scattered bustle was inescapable, but somehow the changes only served to emphasise the familiar look of the place. Alongside the splashes of renovation was the scarred brick of the tenement blocks, and it was the same with the people. Under the short skirts and high heels, or the tight jeans and tailored jackets which had sprouted along the Schönhauser Allee, were the same scrawny bodies and sallow complexions. Everything here was slower too, as if the city itself moved to a different, more deliberate, Ossi beat. George had never noticed any of this before. Now he had to remind himself, with a little shiver of irritation, that he too was an Ossi. As a child his mother had brought him here to the rushing junction where Schönhauser Allee and Danziger Strasse met Kastanienallee and Ebenwalder Strasse. Beyond was the Wall which marked the border where he should never go, she said, but at the time, the warning had been unnecessary. The spot where they stood, it seemed, was like the centre of the world, a teeming and sophisticated metropolis.
He crossed the junction and passed between steel pillars into the shadow of the railway overhead. In a couple of minutes he was walking down the cobbled street where Liebl’s office was situated. Up ahead he could see the neon sign above a narrow shopfront – Experte Sicherheit.
He pushed open the door, which set off an electronic buzzer. The reception was a shallow room a few metres long. Against one wall was a polished wooden