sport since he was about fourteen, and when the door closed on that prospect he had been left with no idea what to do and practically no incentive to pursue other prospects.
On the morning that Liebl walked into his office that first time George had long outgrown his dreams of sporting stardom, but he retained the habit of weighing up other men for their potential in the boxing ring. Sometimes he would find himself gazing at someone taller than himself and wondering with which hand he would lead or how fast he was on his feet. It took only one glance to see that Liebl would be a hopeless case. One punch and he’d be down. George smiled, thinking about it, and Liebl’s big moonface split in reply.
‘What can I do for you?’ George asked.
Liebl collapsed slowly on to one of the rusty steel chairs. George’s office was also a storeroom where tins of cabbage and beetroot stood piled on the floor next to the bottles of schnapps and vodka. His desk was a sturdy pine table, marked by the scratchings of generations. In one corner a carved swastika had been converted into a crude hammer and sickle. With the addition of three chairs, there was just enough space left to walk around the table and out of the door.
George laid down the sheaf of receipts he had been totting up, and faced Liebl with his arms folded, realising now that the man must have some official function.
‘Thomas Liebl,’ the man grunted. ‘Sicherheit.’
The word startled George.
‘Security? What about Werner?’
On the previous morning he had spoken with the head of security, Werner, an easy-going veteran who had served in George’s unit ten years before.
‘Werner has been transferred. I’m here now.’
George’s heart skipped a beat. He was certain that Werner had not known about his own transfer, and if everything had been as normal he would have toured the place saying goodbye. The answer must be that they had brought him up in front of the factory’s conflict committee in the afternoon and then kicked him out of the gates. Right now his friend would be cleaning up some filthy dump, or shovelling medical waste and body parts. Even worse, he might have been arrested. The entire affair would have had to have taken less than twenty-four hours. Flabbergasted, George was about to ask what had happened when he realised that it might be unwise to show too much interest.
‘You were friends?’
Liebl was smiling again.
‘We talked,’ George said cautiously, ‘about the army.’
He could hardly deny it.
‘Did you talk about the vodka?’
This time George’s stomach lurched. He had been selling cases of the stuff on the black market for over a year. It wasn’t the sort of transgression which interested Werner as long as he got his regular supplies. George had always assumed that he was taking a cut from every hustle which went on in the factory. Everyone had some kind of scam working for them, and it was easy to forget that it was a crime until you were caught.
‘Vodka?’
He was playing for time, but he knew he had been caught, and looking at Liebl he noticed that the curve of his fat lips wasn’t a smile at all, merely a reflex expressing some kind of pain or stress. Realising this, he understood that the man was playing with him, the eyes gleaming through the folds of flesh as cruel as a cat.
‘The vodka that the Poles bring you,’ Liebl said, ‘costs less than half the stuff you put on the books. Everyone knows that.’
That was the way things were, George wanted to reply, but he knew by now that whatever was going on was also something to do with the way things were. The truth was that the canteen swindles had been going on before he arrived and they were a part of his everyday routine. He suspected that Liebl knew this already, and he probably knew that most of the products on George’s books ended up on the black market or in the kitchens of the production committee – two days earlier the manager himself had collected half a dozen bottles – but for some reason they had decided to throw him to Liebl.
‘They say you’re a good worker,’ Liebl continued, ‘and I don’t want to charge you with anything.’
So all this had merely been a preamble to his real purpose, a way of letting George know that he had to give Liebl what he wanted. The question which remained in his mind was why the man hadn’t simply asked for a few bottles. Werner had understood the limits. If his replacement was greedy it might cause problems.
‘What do you want?’ George asked.
‘We want you to do a job.’
Whatever it was, George thought, he wanted nothing to do with it.
‘I have a job,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want a transfer.’
‘We don’t want to transfer you.’
For the first time it occurred to George that Liebl wasn’t simply a security officer.
‘Who is we?’
‘Stasi.’
At last he understood. This was the way that state security operated, and he would have to do whatever it was they wanted.
At the beginning it was easier than he would ever have imagined. Liebl wanted to know about the black market, where the products came from, where they went and who handled them. Most of it he already knew. The rest he could have found out by observing what went on around the factory. George laid down ground rules. He refused to talk about his colleagues or about his mother and her job translating for Soviet officials.
‘I respect that,’ Liebl said. ‘We are only concerned with the vandals who are undermining the State.’
As time went on George never trusted Liebl any more than he had that first morning, but before long he felt at ease. Liebl, he understood, wrote exhaustive reports about everything he learnt, yet little or nothing seemed to change. He had half expected some of the traders he knew to disappear, perhaps a few transfers or arrests, but things at the factory went on much as they had always done. Liebl’s questions came to seem like a bit of a joke, a sort of monthly quota with which he filled his notebook. Improbably, Liebl turned out to be a boxing fan, with an encyclopaedic memory for lists of fighters from Poland, the Ukraine and Cuba. Somehow he had managed to see films of fighters like Muhammed Ali, and he revelled in describing every blow in famous matches like the Thriller in Manila. When he did this his arms flailed, his little eyes gleamed and he gasped for breath. After a while George realised that he actually liked the man, and it would have been hard for him to imagine the rage and contempt he would come to feel in Liebl’s presence.
On the other hand, as he told Valentin when they began talking about what to do with the Levitan, if you wanted to sell a painting of dubious origins and ownership, it wouldn’t be hard to find interested parties, but the problem was avoiding buyers who were police informers or simple thieves. If Liebl was well disposed he could send them to a buyer who was safe and would keep his mouth shut. Valentin’s response was to urge him to see Liebl.
‘So he was Stasi. That’s much better. He will have to be quiet.’
George shrugged. Up until the moment he mentioned Liebl he had had no intention of speaking to him ever again, but when he thought about
