Free Stasi Child by David Young

Gottfried stopped again for a moment. He tilted his head back slowly, letting his eyes pan upwards, admiring the building’s red-brick solidity and the green patina of its copper steeple, disappearing through the smog haze into the moonlit sky. It appeared to have survived the war’s bombs and bullets better than the old woman he’d almost bumped into.
    As he walked up the steps to the church’s front door, some fractional movement or flash in the corner of his eye made him turn and peer up at one of the windows in an apartment block across the road. There was a man in the shadows, holding something. Watching from the second floor. His face looked remarkably like that bastard Tilsner, Karin’s deputy. The man moved away from the window. Gottfried wondered for just an instant whether he should run across the road to the apartment and confront him. But then he shook his head, turned and entered the church. It almost certainly wasn’t Tilsner, just someone who looked a little like him from a distance. I need to pull myself out of this – I’m becoming obsessed .

9
    Day Six.
    Plänterwald, East Berlin.
    Müller pulled the collar of her overcoat up around her ears, and then wrapped one lapel inside the other to try to keep out the cold. The brisk walk from Plänterwald S-bahn station had temporarily increased her internal body heat, but now – waiting by the unmanned ticket office of the Kulturpark – the icy morning air seemed to be eating into her bones. Although Jäger had said he wanted to meet somewhere quiet, she hadn’t quite expected it would be the Republic’s only amusement park: closed for the winter, empty and covered in snow. The day, time and venue had been in a typewritten sealed note on Ministry for State Security official paper, delivered to her in person at Marx-Engels-Platz by a motorcycle messenger. That was strange enough in itself, but disturbingly Jäger had also asked her to make sure she wasn’t followed. On the S-bahn, she’d thought for a moment that a man in builders’ overalls had been doing just that. He’d got on at Marx-Engels-Platz, in the same carriage, and although she’d tried not to look at him, she got the impression that he was occasionally checking on her. But Müller was the only passenger to alight at Plänterwald, and she chided herself for her paranoia.
    She hitched up her coat sleeve and glanced at her watch. Five past ten: he was five minutes late already. She pulled the sleeve back, dug her hands deep into her coat pockets and then turned, scanning the approaches to the park. No one – not a soul. Not even the sound of birdsong to disturb the near silence.
    Then a clang of metal, from where she hadn’t expected, the entrance to the park itself, and there was Jäger, in casual clothes but carrying a briefcase, accompanied by a man she didn’t recognise, wearing the uniform of the VEB – the state-owned enterprise that ran the park.
    ‘Sorry I’m a little late, Oberleutnant . The caretaker, Comrade Köhler here, isn’t used to visitors at this time of year, and I had to go and track him down. He’s going to take us somewhere private for our meeting.’ Müller gave a small nod, as the caretaker gestured to her and Jäger to follow him through the turnstiles.
    As they entered the park, Jäger’s eyes met hers. ‘You look frozen stiff, Comrade Oberleutnant .’ He patted the front of his sheepskin jacket. ‘This is what you need for weather like this.’ Then he pinched the sleeve of Müller’s grey-green overcoat, rubbing it between his finger and thumb. ‘Not a People’s Police overcoat.’
    Müller laughed. ‘I wish I could afford one, Comrade Oberstleutnant . I expect the salary of police first lieutenant is slightly lower that that of a Ministry for State Security lieutenant colonel.’
    Jäger smiled a knowing smile. Not everything was equal in this socialist state of workers and peasants, thought Müller, but it was still a fairer world than on the