The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [140]
Margarete Peiper, twenty-nine, Konrad’s wife. Petite, ravishing, workaholic. By twenty, a music arranger, record producer and personal manager of three of Germany’s top rock bands. By twenty-five, sole owner of the massive Cinderella, Germany’s largest recording studio, two record labels and homes in Berlin, London and Los Angeles. Currently, chairman, principal owner and driving force behind A.E.A., Agency for the Electric Arts, a huge, worldwide, talent organization representing top writers, performers, directors and recording artists. Insiders say Margarete Peiper’s guiding genius is that her psyche is permanently tuned to the “youth channel.” Critics see her ability to stay on top of a vast and growing young contemporary audience as more frightening than extraordinary because what she does teeters so precariously between creative brilliance and outright manipulation, of the will. A charge she has always denied. Hers, she maintains, is nothing more than a vigorous, lifelong commitment to people and to art.
Retired Air Force Major General Matthias Noll, sixty-two. Respected political lobbyist. Brilliant public speaker. Champion of the powerful German peace movement. Outspoken critic of rapid constitutional change. Held in high regard by a large population of aging Germans still ravaged by the guilt and shame of the Third Reich.
Henryk Steiner, forty-three. Number-one groundshaker in the new Germany’s not so quietly rumbling labor unrest. Father of eleven. Stocky, immensely likable. Cut from the mold of Lech Walesa. Dynamic and extraordinarily popular political organizer. Holds the emotional and physical backing of several hundred thousand auto and steelworkers struggling for economic survival within the new eastern German states. Imprisoned for eight months for leading three hundred truck drivers in a strike protesting dangerous and underrepaired highways, he was only two weeks out of jail before leading five hundred Potsdam police in a token four-hour work stoppage after red tape had left them unpaid for nearly a month.
Hilmar Grunel, fifty-seven, chief executive, HGS-Beyer, Germany’s largest magazine and newspaper publisher. Former ambassador to the United Nations and vociferous conservative, oversees daily operation and controls editorial content of eleven major publications, all of which take a strong and heady view from the right.
Rudolf Kaes, forty-eight. Monetary affairs specialist at the Institute for Economic Research at Heidelberg and key economic adviser to the Kohl government. Lone German representative on the board of the new European Economic Community’s central bank. Vigorous advocate for a single European currency, acutely aware of how thoroughly the German mark already dominates Europe, and how a single currency based on it would only serve to enhance German economic might.
Gertrude Biermann (also a guest on the lake steamer in Zurich), thirty-nine. Single mother of two. A predominant force in the Greens, a radical leftist peace movement tracing its roots to the attempt to keep U.S. Pershing missiles out of West Germany in the early 1980s. Influence reaches deep into a German conscience disturbed by any attempt at all to align Germany with the military West.
There was a buzz and Uta saw Salettl pick up the telephone at his elbow. He listened, then hung up and glanced at Uta.
“Ja,” he said.
A moment later the door opened and Von Holden entered. Briefly he scanned the room, then stood