Two Brothers

A Proposal London, 1956

STONE SWALLOWED TWICE before he replied.

He had only just begun adjusting to the certainty that Dagmar was alive after so many years of wondering. And now this.

‘A spy? My sister-in-law is a spy? I find that –’ he struggled for the right word and failed — ‘very strange.’

‘Well, not necessarily a spy,’ the plump little man whom Stone had begun to think of as Peter Lorre conceded. ‘Shall we try and drum up some fresh tea?’

‘I don’t care about bloody tea!’ Stone snapped, the swear word sounding rather strange and forced in his half ‘foreign’ accent. ‘What do you mean, not necessarily a spy? Is she or isn’t she?’

‘Let’s put it this way, she definitely works for the East German secret police,’ Lorre replied, ‘that much we do know. Your sister-in-law is a Stasi girl.’

The Stasi. The very word made every hair on his body stand on end. All German police organizations made Stone’s skin crawl and would do until the day he died. Even the innocent, smiling young pastel-green and khaki-clad West Germans with their untidy hair and deliberately non-militaristic insignia were hard for him to stomach. But the Stasi were a new Gestapo. Working in the Foreign Office Stone knew enough about their activities to feel physically sick at the mere mention of their name.

This was his old enemy reborn.

Stasi. Even the word sounded like Nazi.

‘You’re wrong,’ Stone replied. ‘You must be. I simply can’t believe the woman I knew is a member of… that organization.’

‘Oh, she’s one of theirs all right. We can be very clear on that.’ It was the other man who answered, speaking for the first time since the interview had begun. The one Stone had cast in his mind as Humphrey Bogart. Except that Humphrey Bogart had never spoken with a Yorkshire accent.

‘Dagmar Stengel née Fischer works for the Stasi,’ Bogart went on, ‘which is why we’re interested in the fact that she made contact with you. Why do you think she wanted to make contact with you, Mr Stone?’

It was such a soft accent with its friendly vowels and timeless Englishness, like J.B. Priestley on the radio in the war. But it seemed to Stone that there was nothing soft or friendly about the intent of what the man was saying.

‘She’s my sister-in-law,’ he said.

Bogart merely smiled, leaving Peter Lorre to reply.

‘Yes. Your sister-in-law,’ he said, brushing shortbread crumbs from his tie, ‘and such was her filial affection that it took her seventeen years to get in touch. And then on the strength of this one contact, a contact that you could not even be sure was genuine, you began immediately to plan a trip to East Berlin, a trip which in your position you must have known would raise eyebrows within certain departments.’

‘My position?’

‘Oh come on, Stone!’ Lorre snapped. ‘You work in the Foreign Office. The German Department of the Foreign Office.’

Stone said nothing. He could see their point, of course.

‘It just seems to us,’ the Yorkshire voice said, calm and low, ‘that it is a little injudicious for a mid-ranking official of the British Foreign Office to be so eager to make contact with a Stasi officer, sister-in-law or not.’

‘Except I didn’t know she was a Stasi officer! And I have to say I’m astonished that you think Dagmar is — she was never remotely political as a girl.’

‘If you live in East Germany you’re either a Communist or you’re pretending to be a Communist,’ Peter Lorre said. ‘I don’t think the authorities care which. Besides, the Red Army liberated her. A girl would be grateful, I imagine.’

‘From what I know of what the Red Army did on their way west in 1945, very few German women would have had reason to be grateful to them.’

‘But your sister-in-law was Jewish.’

‘And the Soviets have always loved a Jew, haven’t they?’ Stone replied with bitter sarcasm. ‘You know as well as I do what the NKVD attitude was to Jews. Those Kremlin wolves weren’t much better than the Nazis.’

‘Which brings us to the point,’ Bogart said with a smile.

‘There’s a point? I mean apart from virtually accusing me of planning treason?’

‘Yes. There’s a point. Your sister-in-law is not an obvious fit for the Stasi, not least because of its endemic anti-Semitism.’

‘Which is why—’ Stone began to protest.

‘And yet Dagmar Stengel is definitely one of their officers,’ Peter Lorre interrupted, anticipating Stone’s objection, ‘there can be no doubt about that. No doubt at all. We looked into her the moment she wrote to you.’

It was a horrible thought but it was possible. The teenager Stone had known might not have been political but she had been intelligent and tough and self-motivated. Dagmar was a survivor, and who could imagine what horrors she had been through in the years since they had last met. What compromises she had made. How much she had changed.

‘A Jew working for the Stasi suggests to us a person who would work for anyone,’ the Bogart figure remarked, resuming his calmer, almost disinterested tone, ‘and we wondered, since you’re going that way, if you might like to try and persuade her to work for us.’

The man smiled as he said it. As if he had been asking Stone to deliver a small gift or return a book.