By the path, there is a low metal gate in the fence, shut with a chain and padlock. By the gate is a wooden pillbox to fit one person to take the money and dispense the tickets when the lido is open. The stand is closed up with padlocked stable doors.
It is easy to step over the gate. The fence and the gate are there just to deter summer visitors from entering the lido unnoticed, without paying. I walk past the pillbox ticket office, across the icy wood surface and past the boarded-up refreshment stands.
Behind them, on a broad wooden slatted deck area, are several dozen upturned rowing boats, sailing dinghies, tenders for larger boats anchored in the lake for the summer–nything that their owners had too little space or too much money to bother to take home with them at the end of the season. Most are covered, but the blue plastic covers are stretched across the hulls in such a way that I can pick out the boats’ names written on the bow or on the transom.
I walk up and down the rows of boats, pausing to look at names, and lift the flap of a hanging cover, here and there, for a better sight. I translate the mostly German names, the type of silly, fond names that people give boats: Our Boys, Jaws, Titanic, Beautiful Melinda. By the time I reach the end of the last row, I have spent nearly an hour and am cold again. Every name I stop to study; I turn them this way and that, trying to see another meaning, another message from Finn. But it is no good. I leave the lido and hurry further up the path and into the gasthaus for warmth and coffee.
There is a solitary girl behind the bar at this quiet time of the day. I ask her about the lidos that dot the shoreline. She says that only local people kept their boats in most of them, including the one I had randomly chosen, and that if I am from out of town, the only place I can keep a boat is at a lido in the next village of Rottach-Egern. There, she says, they allow casual visitors to leave boats over the winter. I finish my coffee and take a bus for less than a mile along the lake.
Rottach-Egern is all but joined to Tegernsee by the scattering of houses and small inns between them. It lies at the edge of the lake and its lido stretches out a hundred metres from the shore.
It is built in a similar way and there is nobody to prevent me from getting inside, nobody around in winter at all. There is nothing to steal, except boats, and nobody in their right mind would wish to take a boat out at this time of year, even for a prank.
Again I walk the rows of upturned boats, checking the names. Finally I come to a sailing dinghy, perhaps fourteen feet long and made of wood. I look at the bow and there is no name written there. Its winter cover obscures the stern. I cut the string and lift up the thick plastic. The boat is called Windsbraut, Bride of the Wind. I see that the writing covers another, previous name that has been painted out.
I untie the rest of the blue plastic cover and peel it away and see a smooth, blue-painted hull with a slit in the centre for a daggerboard. I lift the boat up from the side as far as I can, but it is heavy and I can’t hold it and look inside the hull at the same time. So I let it down and look around for something to prop it up.
There is the heavy concrete base of a parasol near one of the covered refreshment stalls and I half drag, half roll it over, placing it close to the hull and managing to lift the boat about two feet off the wooden decking to place it precariously on the metal tube the parasol slots into. I get down on my back and worm my way underneath.
The daggerboard casing takes up most of the centre of the boat, there are coiled wires and a plastic bailer tied on to a thwart. Around the insides of the cockpit are ballast tanks built into the hull. They have four circular black plastic screw tops about six inches across that give access to the tanks. I begin to unscrew each one of them and to pull out the inflated yellow plastic ballast sacks inside. I pull them out one by one and when I’ve finished I worm out from under the boat. There are six ballast sacks in all. I pick up each one until I find which of them contains an object that I can feel sliding up and down inside. The rest I kick back under the hull. I lower the boat back on to the decking, put the parasol base back where I found it and cover and tie the boat again with its plastic sheet.
I let the air out of the ballast sack until I can fit it, and the solid object I can feel it contains, under my coat.
I find a taxi and take it to the market square in Tegernsee and walk, carefully again–watching for other interested eyes–until I approach the pink house.
In the kitchen I study the yellow ballast bag. I see its plastic seams have been carefully parted in order to store an object inside, and have then been melted together again. I rip it open with a knife. Inside is a watertight package and, inside that, an exercise book. I open it up and, from the first lines, see that this story begins with Finn’s alternative history lesson.
I take it into the sitting room, light the fire, and sit on the sofa.
‘Vladimir Putin took up his KGB posting in Dresden,’ Finn begins, ‘in 1980, the year that Oskar Kokoschka died. He occupied a KGB residence two streets away from where Kokoschka held the Professorship of Arts at the Dresden Academy between 1917 and 1924. There the similarities end.
‘Putin was one of the guardians of Yuri Andropov’s post-Soviet vision, in which the outmoded, outdated methods of all the years since the Russian Revolution were to be reconfigured, under the watchful gaze of the first KGB president, Andropov. But then Andropov died prematurely. His successor, Chernenko, was a throwback to the Brezhnev era and lasted little more than a year before he, too, died.
‘And then they ushered in Gorbachev, who would always have the KGB at his shoulder.
‘Putin ran a large network of agents in East Germany. The most important of these was a man named Klaus-Maria Sudhoff. Sudhoff was another Russian-German, like Schmidtke, who had been stationed in Dresden for five years before Putin arrived. Sudhoff, apart from being the conduit between Schmidtke and the KGB, was also the main contact between all of them and Otto Roth.
‘Sudhoff knew where all the skeletons were buried. Sudhoff was involved in KGB arms and drugs trafficking and he worked with terrorist groups in the West, particularly in West Germany. His friendship with Putin was described as instant. They hit it off like old friends.
‘In January 1990, Putin began to sign contracts with all his operatives in East Germany which promised them, only a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the KGB would look after its own. Contracts were written and toasted in Sekt, Putin’s favourite wine while he was based in Dresden. Plans were drawn up to give his network new identities, send them to other countries or simply bring them to live in Russia. The deals were sealed with a handshake from Putin.
‘But as so often with such plans, the promises were never kept and some agents began to make threats and feel threatened at the same time. Some disappeared, Sudhoff among them.
‘One of Putin’s agents, Klaus Zuchold, finally went over to the BND, West Germany’s secret service, and gave the names of fifteen spies in West Germany working for Moscow. But the West Germans decided not to pursue the names he gave them, and they buried them in their attempt to obliterate the complex past, just as they were to sweep Schmidtke under the carpet during the same years.
‘Klaus-Maria Sudhoff was among those names. And he disappeared sometime in 1990.
‘He was finally found face down in a canal in Berlin in March 1992. He’d consumed a great deal of alcohol, no doubt, but that was only partially responsible for his death. The official record claims the cause of death as “drowning”.