‘Good day,’ I said. Both men nodded with an almost imperceptible movement of the head. Reaching into my pocket I brought out a half-bottle of schnapps. I twisted the cap from it and offered them a swig. Only after they had drunk some did I gulp at it myself. It warmed my throat. I gave it to Werner, who pretended to drink some. Werner was not keen on booze and particularly hated apple schnapps.
Taking my time with some preliminaries about the weather and the changing seasons, I asked them to remember the previous June. Had they seen a car or any kind of van or camper … left parked in the next field? Or anywhere near the Autobahn. Some time last summer. I didn’t give them the exact date; it was better to reserve one known fact against which to test the information.
‘Yes,’ said the elder of the two men. ‘Dark green: a sort of van.’
The younger one added: ‘It was there two days and nights. There was no one inside it. We went and took a close look at it. It had a cooking stove, and a soft bed inside. No one went near it. Then, a couple of days later, it had gone. Gone in the night.’ The younger man’s voice was keener and he seemed more accommodating than his father. They looked alike, except in stature. The elder man was short, his unshaven face deeply lined, and his manner resigned.
The younger man was freshly shaven, his hair cropped in a style that Germans thought was American. His clothes, although equally old, were cleaner than his father’s. Under his waterproof jacket the boy had Western-style denim pants. He said: ‘We thought it might have been damaged on the Autobahn and waiting for the tow-truck. But it seemed to be in perfect condition.’ The boy was unafraid, almost defiant in his willingness to help us. The two Germans personified the history of their land. The wary old man was a typical product of wartime rationing, postwar shortages and the rigours of the police State. The confident boy was tall and fit, a beneficiary of State welfare but restless and discontented.
‘It sounds like what I’m looking for,’ I said.
‘Are you the police?’ said the young man. He had been studying my English trenchcoat and waterproof hat with the close interest that comes from living in a society where imports are virtually unobtainable. He was about eighteen, and strong enough for the toil of a farm with few mechanical implements.
‘I work for an insurance company in Stuttgart,’ I said. ‘I’m a claims adjuster. I make sure my company doesn’t get swindled by false claims.’ That explanation seemed to satisfy them that I wasn’t dangerous. The most dangerous visitors were of course the avid communists from the West: trade union officials and activists and busybodies. These were the ones that were likely to report any lack of enthusiasm they encountered in citizens lucky enough to live in a workers’ paradise. ‘I’m a capitalist,’ I said. It was usually the best way of being reassuring.
‘That’s where it was,’ said the boy, pointing a finger.
So Thurkettle had parked his camper under the trees. He’d pulled off the feeder-road to where the silver birches sprang from the unruly gorse. This was a land of sand and birch and beech; the sort of landscape in which I had grown up and felt at home. ‘A Volkswagen. Not new. West Berlin licence plates.’ The younger one sensed there was money in it; I could tell by the way he looked at me. He was trying to introduce the subject of payment. In the West he would have asked directly. Such reticence here was not only a legacy of the socialist State, it went right back to the old Germany where any mention of money carried with it a stigma. Nowadays such niceties had long since been forgotten by hotel staff, and others who came into regular contact with Westerners. But here in the countryside such manners remained.
‘Did you see anything else over there?’ I asked. ‘Anything at all?’ They looked at each other and then said no with rather too much emphasis. I let it go. ‘He’s claiming for a wrist-watch, an expensive wrist-watch,’ I said. They nodded but seemed unconvinced. I suppose they were wondering why the insurance company had waited so long before investigating the claim. Fortunately there is a prevalent view in the East that Western-style capitalism moves in strange inexplicable ways.
‘We don’t go over there near the road,’ said the younger man. He smiled, revealing uneven and overcrowded teeth. He might have been a handsome youth but for that. Eastern Europe had not yet discovered orthodontistry. With no proper elections to contest, its leaders did not need teeth and hair. ‘The land is the property of the State,’ he added. At one time it would have been the ‘property of the people’, but now only party members were clinging to such starry-eyed notions. All pretence had gone: land and people were the property of the State, and woe betide anyone who forgot it. Soon the State would make a more immediate claim upon the boy. He was obviously waiting for the summons that would take him for the compulsory couple of years of military service.
I nodded. The three long Autobahnen that linked West Germany to Berlin were subject to complex laws and international agreements. Westerners were permitted to use them, subject to checks at each end of the journey. But even to wander a few yards from the road was a serious offence. The sort of offence that I was now committing.
‘We keep away,’ said the old man to further endorse his son’s statement. It was apparent that they were tenant farmers, which was as near to capitalism as the German Democratic Republic was likely to get. The State remained the sole owner of the tiny plot of land they farmed, while they were permitted to work it and sell its produce for gain. But one had only to look at them to see that, after taxes and rent, the gain was very small. The government wanted to ease the food shortages but they didn’t want anyone to start thinking that such capitalism was widely desirable.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, as if searching for something to say. ‘I forgot to mention it: there is a reward.’
I passed the apple schnapps to them for a second round, and we stood there looking at the endless flat land, at the occasional truck and car that went whizzing past on the Autobahn, and at the smoke rising from the chimney of what must have been their lop-sided little brick farmhouse. There was no shelter. The sleet stung my face and reddened my hands. I blew on my fingers to get the circulation going but the two men seemed hardly to notice the wind or the wet ice that dribbled down their faces.
‘Reward?’ said the son.
‘Two hundred West Marks,’ I said.
‘For what?’ said the father, his caution signified by the way he laid his hand upon his son’s arm.
‘For any material thing … for any piece of solid evidence that will convince my company that the thief came here.’
The two men looked at each other. I got out my wallet and flipped it open casually to reveal a lot of West German paper money.
‘There was a motorcycle,’ said the son. ‘The remains of one … It is badly burned, so not much of it is left.’
‘Find me a piece of it, and one hundred marks is yours,’ I said.
They took me to a ditch near where they said the camper had been parked. It would have taken hours, perhaps days, and a properly organized search party to find it. ‘We saw it burning,’ said the boy.
‘We found it after it was burned,’ said his father in flat contradiction to his son. ‘It was just like this when we found it.’
I could see why the old man changed his account. The bike had been stripped. It was bereft of any valuable part that could be carried away and concealed. Perhaps the burning had been a way of disguising the extent of the theft.
‘Have you got time to help me?’ I said. ‘I pay twenty West Marks per hour.’ Neither man answered me. By that time we all knew it was a rhetorical question. ‘I want to search the ditch.’
The two men used their potato hooks and began to stab into the hidden depths of the ditch to find anything that had broken free from the bike.
‘Now do you see what happened, Werner? Thurkettle came here on his motor-bike, dumped it here and left in a camper.’
I looked down into a drainage canal to see the motor-bike better. Over time it had settled deeper into the earth. I climbed down
to examine it more closely. Although its remains were damaged to the point of being virtually worthless the frame was not old. I pulled some brambles away to see the engine; all the electrical accessories had been stripped out. The motor-bike was wide and squat-shaped: one of those high-powered BMWs. And it wasn’t the costly sort of Western luxury that citizens of the DDR would be likely to spend their precious hard currency on. Or abandon by the roadside.
‘It’s a beauty,’ I said. The two men looked down at me without changing their dour expressions. Werner smiled. Despite the way I was trying to remain cool and composed, I suppose he could see how pleased I was. Werner liked to tell me that I frequently behaved like a schoolboy. No doubt at some future time he would quote today’s doings as evidence of it. ‘A beauty!’
‘You’re getting mud all over you,’ said Werner.
When new it had been an impressive machine, its chrome bright and paintwork glistening. Its engine must have made it as powerful as many a small car. Now the frame was twisted and blistered with burning. Its fuel tank had held enough to make a ferocious blaze. Both wheels had disappeared, and every part of the engine not caked in mud was ravaged by fire. Only the tiniest pieces of heavy plastic remained to show where the rivets had fixed saddle and panniers to the frame.
I took out my Olympus camera and took some photos of the wreck. The camera was tiny, and over the years of using it I had found that pictures could be taken, and the camera hidden again, before anyone really noticed what you were doing. That’s how it was now.
‘Probe the ditch all the way along to the ramp,’ I said.
‘Let’s get out of here while we can,’ said Werner softly in English.
It made me angry. Although he said it in English the tone of his voice was enough to create anxieties in the two locals. Luckily the thought of the money seemed to keep them going.
Each man carried a three-pronged Kartoffelhacke, which they had been using to turn over the manure. They dragged the prongs through the drainage canal, twisting them to disentangle the roots and brambles and dislodge clods of sandy earth. They knew about clearing ditches and automatically assumed positions as a pair: the old man in front and the boy behind digging deeper. To account for the need for such meticulous searching, I explained to them again that we were looking for the wrist-watch. Werner grunted. He was about to say something but changed his mind, and smiled instead.
Any more sardonic remarks from Werner were silenced when the old man’s fork struck the leather case. By now the two farm-workers had caught the fever of finding buried treasure. ‘Fifty marks,’ I said as he pulled it up for me to inspect. I handed the money over.
It was a Samsonite metal-framed document case. The frame was only slightly corroded and its imitation leather exterior was little affected by the months it had spent in the ditch. Apart from a long gouge and a bad dent on the under-side, it could have been cleaned up to look no worse than the average item of luggage seen on commuter trains every morning. It was not locked but there was enough corrosion on the hinge fittings to make it stiff to open. It was slimy inside with a coating of fuzz. All kinds of grubs, worms and squrming animal life had made a home in it. I ran my hand around the rotting cloth lining. Werner watched me. There was nothing there until I scratched at the lining with my fingernails. I peeled a label from where it had stuck, tearing it as I pulled. The ‘label’ was a small piece of a US fifty-dollar bill. I held it under Werner’s nose. ‘How does that grab you, Werner?’
‘You did it, Bernie,’ said Werner with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. ‘How did you know?’ Then it clicked. ‘You talked to Prettyman?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
‘How was he?’
‘Too late for sweets; too early for flowers,’ I said.
‘Is there something wrong?’ said the elder man, who had been trying to follow our conversation in English.
‘This gentleman is my business associate from Dresden,’ I said. ‘We had a disagreement and a small wager about the solution of this mysterious business. Now he is angry to find that my theory was right. He is a bad loser.’
‘Look,’ said the younger man. He had continued prodding into the ditch while I examined the document case. He was about ten metres away from me. He held up the hook. On the point of the prongs there was a large section of rotting fabric: striped like shirt material. There is something here! Gott!’
Farmers are used to life and death, but none of us were prepared for the human remains that he found at the tip of his fork. Dump a side of beef into a ditch on a warm day in June. Within a week it stinks. Flies descend upon it, and so do rats and all the other scavengers of the countryside. Eventually the worms move in. ‘It is Thurkettle,’ I said. He had been there a long time.
‘How do you know who it is?’ said Werner.
‘We’ll get him out,’ I said. ‘And you’ll see.’
‘No,’ said Werner. ‘It’s too risky.’
I ignored Werner’s caution. It was very heavy. An old dried-out cadaver like that would normally have been as light as a feather, but Thurkettle was heavy. His coat had become one with the earth, so that a massive weight of mud was clinging to him. Had the corpse not been clad in tough ballistic nylon coveralls we would never have lifted it intact. But the heavy-duty nylon had defied the attacks of the rodents, and the degradation of nature. The woven plastic was as stout and intact as the day the coveralls were made. With all four of us combining our utmost efforts, we gripped the plastic of his arms and legs, and lifted Thurkettle’s earthly remains out of the ditch like a sack of coal. Puffing with the exertion we dumped it on the embankment. The two locals looked at each other and then they looked at me. The elder man made the sign of the cross. I kneeled down. In places the body had been gnawed to the bone. Half of one arm was missing entirely; little was left of the face, so that the teeth were bared.
Closing my mind to the disgust that human remains always bring, I pushed my folding knife into the body to locate the spine. I’d seen such remains before, but always on a properly drained mortuary slab, with hot black coffee and a cigarette not far away, and a pathologist to do the tricky bits. Now I had to do it on my own. The juicier parts of the internal organs had long disappeared. The rats had gone first for the delicacies: the liver, kidneys and stomach, and for the eyes too.
The position of the body was that of a man cowering from a blow; that defensive posture that some bodies assume in death. Now I could see what time had brought. Some of the muscle was still intact; dried and as hard as granite. Muscular contractions had distorted the skeleton. I probed deeper. What a way to go. No man deserves to be reduced to such a horrifying bundle of old bones and leather.
‘You have found what you were looking for,’ said Werner without pleasure. ‘Let’s go.’
‘I must know the cause of death,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t old age,’ said Werner.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘And if he was shot, I might find evidence of that on the skeleton.’ I looked up at the farmers. The discovery of the dead body had frightened them. What had started off as an amusing way to get their hands on some Western currency had turned into a nightmare that was likely to end with them facing interrogation by the Stasi. I could see what was going through their minds.
‘Give me one more minute,’ I said, closing the knife and putting it away. I shut my eyes and thrust my hands right into the remains. It was hard and bony. My fingers found and felt the spine, and the pelvis and the shoulder-blades. ‘Yes, Werner. Yes, Werner, Yes.’ I said. I could feel what I was searching for: the rough edges on the bones. It wasn’t the gnawing of rats. ‘He’s been hit by a fusillade of bullets,’ I said.
When I examined the coveralls again more closely I found the bullet holes in corresponding positions. There were at least six of them, very close together, the surrounding burn marks still just visible. ‘I’ll settle for that,’ I said. I got to my feet.
‘Gunshot?’ said Werner.
‘Six roun
ds, maybe more: two of them probably high enough to find the heart.’ With my foot I rolled him over. Nothing would have persuaded me to touch the body again except with the toe of my shoe. I was about to give it a final shove that would roll it back into the ditch when I spotted there at the bottom of it what looked like a bright green patch of patterned fabric. ‘What is that?’ I said aloud. But even as I said it I knew what it was. The corpse had been resting upon a fortune in dollar bills. Dozens upon dozens of fifty-dollar bills. Protected by the weight, and by the nylon coveralls, the money had remained fresh and new-looking. I glanced at the others. No one wanted to grope through the worms to get the money. We had all had our fill. With no more hesitation I kicked the corpse gently. It flopped back into the ditch with a squelching sound, a protest that seemed to come from the dead man’s mouth.
‘All gone. All finished,’ I said to the two men. I gave them the rest of my West German money: three hundred marks. ‘Go home,’ I said. ‘Don’t go spending the money and attracting attention to yourselves. You understand? Forget everything. Don’t tell your wife. Don’t tell your neighbour. Don’t tell anyone. We will drive away now. And we will never come back.’
For a moment they stood there transfixed. I thought they were going to make trouble for us. I invented a story for them: ‘It was his wife who did it,’ I said. ‘She is not a bad woman. He beat her. Now she is trying to collect his life insurance. Go home and forget it all. In the West this happens sometimes.’
It seemed ages before the two men looked at each other and without speaking turned and began to walk back to their home and their fields. I had a feeling that they were going to walk until we were out of earshot and then discuss it. While I was still trying to decide what to do, Werner went after them. I watched him as he stopped and talked with them. I couldn’t hear what he said but they both nodded assent. When Werner returned he said: it will be okay.’