Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [146]
The other bedrooms had also been turned into wards and more zinc-lined baths. Cigarette smoke traveled out the open transom of an office. They climbed to the third floor. In the ceiling of the stairwell where a chandelier had once hung was a fluorescent ring.
Peter said, “I asked myself, if Benz didn’t grow up here, how would he know about my grandfather or what he did in the war? Only the SS or Russians knew. So there are two answers: he’s Russian or German.”
“Which do you think it is?” Arkady asked.
“German,” Peter said. “East German. To be more precise, the Staatssicherheitsdienst. Stasi. Their KGB. For forty years Stasi created identities for spies. Do you know how many people worked for them? Two million informers. More than eighty-five thousand officers. Stasi owned office buildings, apartment houses, resorts, bank accounts in the millions. Where did all the agents go? Where did the money disappear to? In the last weeks before the Wall came down, the agents at Stasi were furiously creating new identities for themselves. When people stormed its offices, they were empty and the master files had evaporated. One week later Boris Benz rented his apartment in Munich. That’s when he was born.”
The third floor was servants’ quarters turned into medicine closets and nurses’ rooms. Panties were drying on a line that ran from corner to corner.
Peter said, “Where could the Stasi go? If they were important, they were going to be put in jail. If they were unimportant, with ‘Stasi’ on their papers no one would hire them. They couldn’t all rush to Brazil like a second wave of Nazis. Russia doesn’t want thousands of German agents. What’s this?”
A narrow stairway was blocked by pails. Peter moved them aside, climbed the stairs and tried the knob of a door built into the ceiling. A sash snapped and dust cascaded down the steps as he pushed the door open.
They pulled themselves up into the tower. The casement windows were buckled, parts of the roof fallen in, and from one corner grew a stunted linden tree, a lifelong prisoner of the tower. The view was wonderful: lakes and rolling hills reaching to Berlin, green country in every other direction. Two stories below was the balcony with the nurse in the wheelchair. She had pushed off her sandals and rolled down her stockings to her calves. She raised the leg rests and angled the chair for more direct exposure to the sun, then lolled back like Cleopatra, the cigarette in her mouth an exclamation point to total ease.
Peter said, “Ask yourself, where does an Ossie find the money to buy eighteen new cars? Or live in Munich? For a man with no history, Benz was born with impressive connections.”
“But why bother your grandfather?” Arkady asked. “What did he get except war stories?”
“Stasi was more than spies; they were thieves. They targeted people with valuable goods. People weren’t just arrested; their savings were taken as ‘reparations to the state,’ and their paintings and coin collections ended up in the apartment of a Stasi colonel. Maybe when Benz disappeared, he took something and doesn’t know quite what. There’s so much still hidden in this country. So much.”
Peter’s was a perfectly German, exquisitely logical answer to the identity of Boris Benz. It wasn’t Arkady’s answer, but he admired it nonetheless.
Peter asked abruptly, “Who is Max Albov?”
“He’s given me a place to stay in Berlin.” Surprised, Arkady tried to go on the offensive. “That’s why I was calling you. You have my passport and I can’t stay in a hotel without it. Also, I want to extend my visa.”
Peter tested a post before leaning against it. “Your passport is the leash I have on you. I’d never see you again if I give it back to you.”
“Is that so bad?”
Peter laughed, then cast his eyes over the trees. “I can imagine myself growing up here. Running in the hall, climbing the roof, breaking my neck. Renko, I worry about you. I followed you to that apartment on Friedrichstrasse yesterday. Albov arrived before I left for Potsdam and I identified him by his