The man in the straw hat dogged his footsteps from the first, keeping
his distance, yet never bothering to hide himself. Rosenharte saw him
loitering outside the hotel when he checked in, then at the conference
centre and later sitting at a cafe in Piazza dell’Unità, a mournful fellow
with a washed-out face, who wore the hat unconvincingly on the back
of his head as though he’d just won it in a shooting gallery.
At times he got so close that Rosenharte could see the ventilation
holes in the side of the hat and a mark on the narrow brim. He wanted
to be seen – that much was clear – and once or twice Rosenharte
thought he was going to approach, but then he seemed to decide
against it and darted away into a side street.
He wondered if the man was the visible part of the Stasi’s surveillance
operation in Trieste, put on his tail to remind him of their
presence. Though he didn’t need it; they had made it clear to him that
the city would be saturated with officers. Everything he did would be
watched.
Perhaps the man was being fielded by a Western agency as some
kind of ploy to draw out the Stasi surveillance. But that didn’t make
sense either. If the Americans or British were watching – which surely
they were – they would know about the Stasi and include them in their
calculations. Eventually he concluded that the straw hat was a detail, a
side issue to something far more menacing.
He ignored the man and threw himself into the conference on the
rise of artistic conscience in the late Renaissance, a theme that had
drawn 150 academics from all over Europe. Between lectures and discussion
groups, Dr Rudi Rosenharte explored the streets of the hot, carefree
city that was so beautifully drenched in summer light. He took himself
to the bars around the main square for cognac and espresso and watched
the passing parade, marvelling at the unbelievable fullness and plenty of
Italian life and – naturally – at the women. Even now his eyes were not
dead to their charms, or to the contrast with life in East Germany where
beauty was scorned as a bourgeois obsession and you couldn’t buy a
lemon from one month to the next.
Yet never for a moment did he forget that he had been brought to
Trieste to rendezvous with an old lover – a lover who he knew had
been dead for the best part of fifteen years but who the Stasi believed was
alive.
On his third day in Trieste she made contact. Inside an envelope
containing the daily conference bulletin was a handwritten note
from Annalise Schering, which instructed him to walk unaccompanied
to the end of "Molo IV" – Pier Number Four – in the Old Port, where
she would be waiting in the early evening with chilled champagne.
There was much to admire about the letter: the handwriting was perfect,
the romantic urgency of the sentiments just right and the location
exactly the sort of desolate, neglected place Annalise would have
chosen. It was as if the authors had bottled and preserved her essence.
He read it several times before using the house phone in the hotel lobby
to call Colonel Biermeier of the Stasi Main Directorate for Foreign Intelligence,
the HVA, who was running the operation in Trieste. Biermeier
came to his hotel room to examine the letter just after three that
afternoon.
"It’s an obvious fake," Rosenharte insisted to the back of Biermeier’s
head as he read it on the little balcony. "It’s a trap. They’re trying to trick
us. We should go back and forget the whole thing."
The colonel shook his head and turned to him, his unhealthy white
face and brilliantined dark-grey hair shining in the sunlight. He blew out
his cheeks and flapped the front of his jacket against the heat. Rosenharte
wasn’t in the least fooled by these diversionary tactics. He returned
a steady gaze, purposefully expelling the anxiety in his mind. Every pore
of Biermeier leaked the Stasi odor, and Rosenharte briefly wondered
how he had carried out so many operations in the West without being
apprehended. "No, Comrade Doktor, this is no fake. The handwriting
matches our samples exactly. We will go ahead as Brigadier-General
Schwarzmeer has ordered."
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