Deception

NINETEEN

In Schwedt, Sylvia Heidl struggled into a thin overcoat and headscarf, picked up a shopping bag, then cast around for a moment before gathering together a pair of worn shoes and an old towel. She placed the phone and passport in the bag, and covered them with the towel. After checking the bag to make sure nothing could be seen, she slipped on her shoes and left the flat.

The air on the landing was cold and damp. She took a deep breath, feeling the customary stab of pain in her chest. It hurt more today than it had in a while, and she wondered if Ulf had managed to get her any more painkillers. She wasn’t sure she could take another day without them.

As she emerged from the prefab concrete block, one of the few cheap workers’ buildings that hadn’t been flattened in the wake of reunification and development, the smell from the refinery and factories engulfed her like a cloak. They had said you would get used to it, but she never had. She followed the path into town. A steady stream of heavy trucks caked in mud thundered along the narrow road, their slipstream tugging at her coat and whipping a spray of damp grit across her face.

She passed only two other women on the way. Both ignored her. The streets in the centre were quiet, with a scattering of cars and one or two pickup trucks. If there was any new wealth from the reunification, it had not yet penetrated this far in any major way, seemingly bypassing the town like the trucks.

She entered a doorway along a narrow street and climbed a steep flight of uneven stairs, her breath rasping in her throat. As she reached the landing a door opened and her brother Ulf peered out. He beckoned her in and closed the door.

‘Do you have them?’ she asked, slumping into a chair. She was struggling for breath, her face a pallid grey and her eyes narrowed to pinpoints.

He nodded and took a twist of paper from his pocket. ‘Only when you have to,’ he reminded her. ‘When the pain is too much.’ He said it each time he gave her the painkillers, but the intervals between her asking for more were getting shorter all the time. Very soon the tablets would fail to make any difference at all.

She took the paper with trembling hands and undid the twist. A tiny tablet slid into her palm, and with a brief nod she put it between her lips and swallowed, her fleshless throat working to push the painkiller down. She smiled. It was too soon for the tablet to have worked, but the act of swallowing seemed somehow to work its magic on her. She carefully re-twisted the paper and placed it in her coat pocket.

‘Let me look at you,’ he said softly, touching her face with a gentle hand. She pushed his hand away with a gentle shushing sound. The clinic had already explained that her exposure years ago to a range of deadly toxins had eaten away at her internal organs and left precious little to save. All Ulf could do was try to make life as bearable as possible.

He poured some of the good coffee he got from a porter at the hospital, and watched as Sylvia breathed in the heavy aroma. She didn’t come here often, although he’d tried repeatedly to get her to share the flat with him, to reduce the burden of a lonely life without her husband. But she always refused stubbornly.

‘No news of Claus?’ He had never cared for her husband, contemptuous of his work for the Stasi — the Staatssicherheitsdienst — East German Security; the same organization which had employed her too, until the Wall came down. But he always asked. Claus had been away ever since, God alone knew where. Running from his enemies, most likely. Or dead.

Sylvia put her mug down and reached inside her bag. Placed the black mobile phone and blood-red passport in front of him. ‘Can you sell these?’ she asked him.

Ulf stared at them in astonishment. He poked the phone with a stubby finger and saw a winking green light. Some of the better-placed army officers carried them down at the hospital in Freienfelde. Kids, too — even the ones with no money. Handys, they called them.

‘Where the hell did you get these?’ He didn’t possess one himself, but understood the basic functions. This one, with a picture screen and lots of little images, looked as if it could track a rocket all the way to the moon.

‘Old Wilhelm found them down by the border. He wants you to sell them and share the money. He’s afraid to try in case he gets ripped off.’

‘Have you shown them to anyone else?’

She shook her head. ‘I was too scared.’

‘God, the old fool must be getting senile!’ he muttered. ‘It’s a good job you didn’t use it. They can track these things from space. Thirty thousand metres up and a satellite tells them just where you’re calling from. “Yes, Commander, we have an old lady in Schwedt, a nowhere spot on the bloody map, and she’s using a stolen phone to call her friends around the world.”’ He sighed guiltily. He was exaggerating. Anyway, who would she have called? He flicked open the passport, his tone softer. ‘Sorry. I’m worried about you, that’s all. These things, they’re like gold dust in the right places. But if you got caught with it. .’

He picked up the phone again and tapped some keys. A list of numbers scrolled up the small screen, showing which ones had been dialled last. Three were to the same number, and began with an overseas code, 00 44. He seemed to recall the number 44 was for the United Kingdom. No doubt he would soon find out if he dialled it. But was it safe?

Then he recalled that these things had a message facility, like ordinary landline phones. He played with the keys until he found the voicemail. It held one message. If the date setting was correct, it had been left nearly two days ago. ‘Listen,’ he said earnestly, placing a reassuring hand on Sylvia’s. ‘We’d get virtually nothing from those thieves at the station. They’d rip us off — or worse. But maybe the owner would pay something to get them back — especially the passport.’ He tapped the phone. ‘This might help me find them.’

‘How will you know you have the owner?’

That was something he didn’t want to think about. ‘I won’t,’ he admitted. If the wrong people heard about this, he could end up as a guest of the police — or worse, in a muddy ditch courtesy of the local Mafiya. . and with no money to help Sylvia. He was already having problems getting the painkillers; the man who supplied him was becoming more greedy and threatening as he sensed Ulf’s desperation. In fact Ulf was sure the man had heard of Sylvia’s past and would one day use that knowledge to demand more money.

He re-read the passport. It was of little help to him; the section at the back under the heading ‘Emergencies’ had been scratched through, maybe as a precaution, although he thought doing that was probably illegal. Maybe a wife, brother or sister no longer available to help, taken by death or divorce.

He played the voicemail message, listening intently. ‘Graham, my name’s Harry Tate. I want to help you. I work in conjunction with the MOD, but I imagine you’re not sure who to trust right now, so I won’t waste time trying to sell you a deal. Call me and we’ll talk. This isn’t as bad as you think.’

Ulf listened to the voice message several more times with a growing sense of excitement, trying to gauge what kind of man was speaking. If he understood the words correctly, the owner of this phone was in some kind of trouble, and this caller, this Englishman, Harry Tate, was offering to help him. But what was this ‘MOD’ he mentioned? He played it again. And again.

Eventually he switched off the phone to conserve the battery. Clearly the man Tate did not know this Graham Barrow. Yet he was offering to help him. Why? And the talk about trust; it sounded like a man offering reassurance of some kind. There followed a number, which Ulf had already written down, in case the battery died. Luckily, the caller had spoken slowly, carefully.

He began to compose in his head what he was going to say. His English was rusty, learned at university a long time ago while studying for his medical degree. But that had been no grounding for conducting a negotiation over a lost Handy and a passport.