Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky

Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary

Valentin, Dimka’s friend

Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy

REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS

Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev

Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev

Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers

Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor

Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev

Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov

Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko

Other Nations

Paz Oliva, Cuban general

Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician

Enok Andersen, Danish accountant

PART ONE

WALL

1961

CHAPTER ONE

Rebecca Hoffmann was summoned by the secret police on a rainy Monday in 1961.

It began as an ordinary morning. Her husband drove her to work in his tan Trabant 500. The graceful old streets of central Berlin still had gaps from wartime bombing, except where new concrete buildings stood up like ill-matched false teeth. Hans was thinking about his job as he drove. “The courts serve the judges, the lawyers, the police, the government—everyone except the victims of crime,” he said. “This is to be expected in Western capitalist countries, but under Communism the courts ought surely to serve the people. My colleagues don’t seem to realize that.” Hans worked for the Ministry of Justice.

“We’ve been married almost a year, and I’ve known you for two, but I’ve never met one of your colleagues,” Rebecca said.

“They would bore you,” he said immediately. “They’re all lawyers.”

“Any women among them?”

“No. Not in my section, anyway.” Hans’s job was administration: appointing judges, scheduling trials, managing courthouses.

“I’d like to meet them, all the same.”

Hans was a strong man who had learned to rein himself in. Watching him, Rebecca saw in his eyes a familiar flash of anger at her insistence. He controlled it by an effort of will. “I’ll arrange something,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll all go to a bar one evening.”

Hans had been the first man Rebecca met who matched up to her father. He was confident and authoritative, but he always listened to her. He had a good job—not many people had a car of their own in East Germany—and men who worked in the government were usually hard-line Communists, but Hans, surprisingly, shared Rebecca’s political skepticism. Like her father he was tall, handsome, and well dressed. He was the man she had been waiting for.

Only once during their courtship had she doubted him, briefly. They had been in a minor car crash. It had been wholly the fault of the other driver, who had come out of a side street without stopping. Such things happened every day, but Hans had been mad with rage. Although the damage to the two cars was minimal, he had called the police, shown them his Ministry of Justice identity card, and had the other driver arrested for dangerous driving and taken off to jail.