Read Online Another Kind of Country by Kevin Brophy - Free Book Online

good question. But he wasn’t about to say that to the adopted daughter of General Reder. His passage into East Germany had been conducted in the headlights of publicity – and under the most twisted of threats. And not threats alone: there had been the seductiveness of living under a banner that he had long championed. Now, having lived under the reality of that banner, and in these days of candlelit demonstrations and soldiers on the streets, he was no longer sure what drum he would march to.
    None of which was tellable to Rosa Rossman. You could say less and still finish up in the holding cells of the Stasi at Normannenstrasse. And it didn’t pay to think about what might lie beyond that: nobody came out of the Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen in the same condition – either physical or mental – as they had entered it.
    Miller decided itwas time to turn the talk in a safer direction.
    ‘General Reder’s life is an example to us all,’ he said.
    ‘He has been more than an example to me,’ Rosa said. ‘He gave me back my life, he and his wife both.’
    Miller was silent. Maybe now he would learn exactly why he had been brought here, away from the listening tapes of his office.
    ‘Maybe sometime I’ll tell you how I came to be here, Patrick.’
    And once more Miller knew he was being measured, examined, considered for something – but what? – by those ebony eyes.
    ‘What about your father, Patrick? Were you close?’
    You’re not slow to use your clout as a general’s daughter to ask sensitive questions.
    ‘We got along – up to a point.’
    ‘The point of politics?’
    ‘My father is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who thinks the sun shines out of Margaret Thatcher’s you-know-what.’
And an old lech who can’t keep it zipped up
.
    ‘And he is
Sir
Roger Miller.’
    Miller shrugged. ‘A piece of medieval flummery.’
    He knew the examination was continuing, that the dark eyes – and the sharp intelligence behind them – were still probing, still assessing. The metal music was pounding again, loud, threatening. The smoke-thick air seemed edged with menace.
Get up from your seat and go – now
.
    He stirred in the chair.
    Rosa Rossman said something he didn’t catch above the hard rock.
    He leanedcloser, straining for her whispered words.
    ‘The general would like to meet you.’
    ‘To discuss his book?’
    ‘Among other things.’
    Among other things. Get up and leave now, while you still can.
    ‘My boss, Director Hartheim, might like to do that particular interview himself.’
    ‘My father doesn’t wish to meet Herr Hartheim.’
    They were both whispering now.
    ‘But that’s not my call, Rosa.’
    She hesitated, shook her head. ‘He doesn’t have to know you’re meeting.’
    This had ‘out of bounds’ written all over it. On the other hand, he might learn something to keep Redgrave off his back for a while.
    ‘But how? You said yourself that we’re always watched.’
    ‘General Reder will organize it.’
    And if Hartheim finds out later, what then? And Hartheim was not the sole problem: technically, Miller’s department was part of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit – what the people called (disparagingly and fearfully) the Stasi. Even a native-born Englishman who had wilfully chosen to live in East Germany could expect no kid-glove treatment in the bowels of Normannenstrasse or Hohenschönhausen.
    All this Miller considered in the moments he looked across the formica-topped table in ZERO at the sculpted face of Rosa Rossman. The invitation to meet secretly with General Reder stank to high heaven; only a fool would think otherwise. And yet . . .
    And yet Miller, in his seven years in East Germany, had grown tired of watching, listening, looking over his shoulder. He was tired of the cross-border trips to West Berlin, the delivery of information that must seem worthless even to Redgrave, cufflinked and proper in his whispering club off the Haymarket.
    After all of it,