The Leipzig Affair

Prologue

PROLOGUE

The version of Marek’s death that Bob has played back to himself most frequently down the years is the one where Marek gets shot in the back. It goes like this:

Marek is walking across the raked sand of the death strip. His stride is loose. His head is held high. He looks confident, like a man who knows where he’s going and what he’s going to do when he gets there. He’s wearing what he was wearing the night Bob first met him at the club in Leipzig: Levi’s and a white cotton shirt. It’s night time. The strip is floodlit. The sky is clear. A half moon casts an eerie glow over the dim-lit buildings of Berlin, Capital of the German Democratic Republic to the east and the lime trees of the Tiergarten to the west.

A guard’s sudden cry cuts the air: “Halt!”

Marek stops, but casually, almost as if he didn’t hear the shout. The beam from an overhead searchlight sweeps across the strip and finds him. He stands in a pool of ultra-bright light.

“Hands up!” the guard screams.

Slowly, Marek raises his arms. Then he leans his head back. His shoulder-length black hair shifts in the night breeze. He looks like Jesus Christ. For a moment, everything is still on the strip. Only the distant rumble of traffic disturbs the calm. Then Marek lets his arms drop and turns his head to look behind him.

Gunfire cracks. A bullet rips towards him. The impact punches the air from his lungs. His legs buckle, and he falls down on to the sand with a thud. His head is turned to one side, and he is looking straight at Bob, his sightless eyes wide in surprise. A trickle of blood forms at his parted lips. A red stain seeps across the white cotton of his shirt. It is strangely beautiful, like an exotic flower.

Bob knows, of course, that these imaginings are preposterous.

– Who would attempt to sneak across the world’s most heavily fortified border in a white shirt?

– Why does he see Marek in Berlin when he knows he was planning to cross the border in the Harz Mountains?

– And how could Marek be looking at him when he wasn’t there?

But that’s his vision of it. Marek in a crisp white cotton shirt. Marek walking across no man’s land with the easy grace of an athlete. Marek – beautiful, clever, bitchy Marek – mowed down by a single bullet fired into his back.

It’s not hard to understand why this scenario provides him with the most exquisite torment. He never knew exactly how Marek died. But he did know that he was shot in the back. And he knew who pulled the trigger: it was him.

He did it to save her. Or that’s what he told himself. But she ended up hating him. Or at least rejecting him.

So ist ja eben das Leben. That’s Life.

PART ONE