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in sunglasses and braided cap; he spent a few minutes closeted on the flight deck with the captain and then left without so much as acknowledging the silent passengers staring up at him.
    The doors of the plane closed and voices chattered like school kids’ when the teacher has left. The thin woman stood up in the aisle and looked back along the plane. The chattering ceased.
    Later, on her way backfrom the cramped toilet, Rosa noticed how all the passengers avoided eye contact with her. They feigned sleep, buried themselves in magazines, looked over her shoulder. What had that woman called them?
A cadre of factory workers
. Factory workers who asked no questions and shunned the eyes of a bunch of latecomers who boarded like refugees in the night. Refugees for whom the plane waited for hours in a remote corner of Asunción Airport.
    What kind of country was it that these silent, cowed workers came from?
    The Tupolev powered north-east through the skies of Europe. The sky was blue, flecked with clouds as innocent as puffs of cotton wool.
    The clouds over Santiago had signalled horror below. She could see her father in La Moneda, knew instinctively that he would have stood close to the President, would have remained beside him to the end. She tried not to think of that end but the blood from her mother’s broken body leaked on to her hands like red slime.
    The tears came then, great silent tears like rain on her face. She felt Dieter’s hand on hers.
    His voice was low and soft, the words German.
    ‘We’ll behome soon, Rosa.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘In Germany.’

Six

    September 1989
    East Berlin
    GermanDemocratic Republic
    They knocked onyour door but they never waited for your answer.
    This time it was Bendtnerwho pushed in the door and stood there, blue-jawed, close-cropped, fully suited.
    ‘The Herr Direktor wishes to see you in his office.’ Hand still on the door handle, ready to depart. ‘Immediately.’
    Miller nodded. He wondered if it was his office alone that Bendtner walked into with such little ceremony.
    He didn’t get the chance to ask. He wouldn’t have asked anyway, even if the door had not closed as abruptly as it had opened. Even if Bendtner were not already halfway down the marble staircase to rejoin his colleague at the porter’s desk in the lobby of 64A Wilhelmstrasse. You learned quickly not to ask too many questions in East Berlin. Not even such innocent ones as why Bendtner was ordered to climb to the fourth floor with a message that Direktor Hartheim (or his secretary) could more easily have delivered by picking up the phone.
    Miller stood up fromhis grey, metal desk and put on his jacket. This September afternoon’s sticky heat wasn’t much affected by the small fan in the corner of the office but the Director was a stickler for formality.
    Miller hurried to the tiled, echoing toilet to check his hair and tie in the small mirror above the equally small washbasin.
    The doors along the corridor were closed. Inside the Secretariat for Socialist Correctness in Publishing you learned to value whatever little privacy you could find.
And after a while you learned that the idea of privacy was an illusion
.
    Enough, Miller told himself, hurrying along the corridor; it’s almost ten minutes since Bendtner delivered his message.
    He tapped gently on the glass door at the end of the corridor.
    Frau Siedel left him standing there for the statutory minute and a half before she opened the door. And in statutory silence she ushered him into her own box of space, the ante-chamber to the Director’s office.
    Miller took care to touch nothing on Frau Siedel’s desk while the secretary phoned to announce his arrival.
    ‘
Ja
.’ The blond head bobbed at the phone. Frau Siedel was young, good-looking, Hartheim’s latest secretary selection. ‘
Alle ist klar
.’ Hartheim’s appetite for young blondes did not go unnoticed in 64A; like much else, it was not spoken of. There was a certain stiffness