‘But she was so shy, so delicate.’
‘Maria was stronger than you realise.’
‘How did Wengler react?’
‘He said she was a drunk who didn’t know what she was talking about. Truth be told it was an easy sell. Besides, most people, myself included, thought she was alluding to Martha Radlewski’s death.’
‘Which was old news.’
‘The rumours didn’t stick, even in ’24. Remember, this was just some alcoholic who’d drunk herself to death. No one blamed Wengler.’
‘Which means no one took Maria Cofalka seriously…’
‘No. Myself and a few friends brought her home. We were afraid she might make a fool of herself, perhaps even put her job on the line. She slept it off, and the next day no more was said on the matter. Maybe she didn’t remember, she was pretty drunk.’
‘Maybe she needed some Dutch courage to confront the great Wengler.’
‘Maybe.’
‘It must have taken a little Dutch courage to entrust those letters to me too.’
‘Our courageous girl,’ Rammoser said, and drank. He turned his face away, and Rath said nothing more.
84
You pack what you need, the rest you will throw on the stove. You take the small case, no deadweight, you can buy the tubocurarine over there. Discovered in transit, drugs will only spell trouble.
Sobotka’s wanted poster falls into your hands, and you don’t know if you should pack it, or throw it in the oven. Already it has begun to yellow.
Escaped Prisoner.
Wanted: Franz Sobotka, thirty-two years old, of Altschöneberg, near Allenstein, sentenced to twenty years for the armed robbery of at least fifteen rural savings and Raifeissen banks in the administrative regions of Allenstein and Königsberg. Sobotka, who escaped while engaged in road construction work east of Wartenburg, has been at large since 5th August 1930.
The description that followed was perfectly adequate, but would have no chance of success.
You remember the day you met Sobotka. A man who never lost his vital energy, he managed to awaken new hope even in you.
Though perhaps hope is the wrong word.
Still, with Sobotka you laughed again for the first time in years; laughed, despite thinking you had forgotten how. In him you found something akin to friendship. After all those years spent thinking mankind was doomed to solitude; that anything else was just an illusion.
Perhaps Sobotka’s friendship was an illusion, but still you laughed at his jokes. You were never angry when he teased you, and afterwards flashed his pearly white smile – because you knew he never meant offence. You felt that warmth again, which only friendship can provide, and so what did it matter if it was based on illusion?
Yes, he made your life bearable again, but you never approved of his escape plans, which he harboured and shared with you from the start. You had no desire to escape from these walls, which afforded you a strange security; you wouldn’t have known what to do on the outside, if there was anything you could do at all.
Then came the day in early summer when everything changed. Everything.
It was the first visitor you’d ever received in Wartenburg, notwithstanding your public defender, who didn’t so much defend you during your trial at Lyck District Court as work on you to take a reduced sentence, for the purposes of which he extracted a confession. You let him extract it, of course, through your silence. It was clear the public prosecutor stood in thrall to the Wengler brothers and their corrupt witnesses. They wanted to send you away for murder, make an example of an alleged Polish sympathiser. Even the police officer had given a false statement; said you’d started the fight with the distillery trio, that he’d locked you up for it and released you an hour later.
It wasn’t true; you were in that miserable cell more than two hours before you could head out to the lake, and find her.
You no longer recall what happened next. It was as if your soul had already left your body as it sat breathing and staring blankly at the lake, and made its way in search of her, whose earthly form lay dead and pale in the water.
Only in court did you learn you must have been crouched by the water more than an hour holding vigil at her corpse, when the policeman emerged from the forest and felled you with the butt of his rifle. The same man who prevented you from saving her life.
There was only one question in that courtroom left unresolved: the true identity of Anna’s killer.
You had to wait ten years for an answer.
You couldn’t place her at first, sitting on the visitor’s chair, shy, hands on her lap, gaze lowered. Wartenburg was no place for a woman like her. Only when she lifted her head and looked at you, did you recognise her.
Maria. The librarian.
You could have almost cried, so greatly did it move you, so little had you expected it. Here was someone from your former life.
She lowered her voice and told you an incredible tale, mentioned there was a witness to Anna’s death.
That she knew who Anna’s killer was.
By the time visiting was over, your views on jailbreak had gone full circle.
To Sobotka’s great delight. For you were part of his plan. They always chained you together during the construction work prisoners carried out in the summer of 1930. The steel ankle shackles kept your hands free so that you could work.
Guards with carbines looked on. They relied more on the shackles than their rifles. The chains could only be cut by a blacksmith prepared to involve himself with escaped convicts.
Sobotka knew which guard was the most careless, having spent months planning and observing the routines, waiting for the decisive moment when the midday heat was at its peak, and the man responsible for your sector sat in the shade and dozed, and almost fell asleep.
It worked out better than you could have hoped.
You made it to the forest before he raised the alarm. There you could let go of the chains, the jangling no longer mattered; you just had to reach the lake before the wardens arrived with the dogs. It would take time for the canine unit to be deployed.
There were many lakes in the woods near Wartenburg, and you chose the first you came upon. It had no landing stage, no boat, nothing. You managed to swim across, just, already you could hear the yapping of hounds as you emerged from the water on the other side. Sobotka grinned, because he knew the dogs would lose your scent at the shore.
Even the shackles didn’t concern him; the railway line to Insterburg ran through the middle of the forest.
‘Not dangerous,’ he had explained with a characteristic grin when mentioning it for the first time. ‘Not dangerous.’
You nodded back then, because you didn’t take his crazy ideas seriously. Because for you they were just theories that could never be implemented in practice.
And yet…
The railway line was the only sign of civilisation far and wide.
It was quiet, a few birds chirruping, wind rustling in the treetops. No dogs. They had lost your scent.
Sobotka lay on the track bed and instructed you to follow suit. On the outside. ‘It isn’t so dangerous there,’ he said.
‘I don’t think it’s dangerous at all.’
‘Not for the person on the outside.’