A Spy in Exile

Ya’ara’s heart skipped a beat as she spotted the weather-beaten figure of Matthias at the far end of the hotel lobby. She walked toward him, and he saw her, too, that same familiar smile spreading across his face. She thought for a second about shaking his hand, but they quickly found themselves wrapped in a warm embrace, Ya’ara momentarily enveloped by his large frame.

“Matthias, it’s been so long.”

“And you, even more beautiful—if that’s at all possible.”

Matthias noted to himself that Ya’ara looked thinner than she had the last time he saw her, a wrinkle of concern now distinctly visible between her eyes. Yes, she had become a serious and grown-up woman. The young girl who once was seemed to have stepped aside.

He wondered if the change had been good for her, if the altered expression on her face was evidence of accumulated experience or something else. Without doubt, however, her beauty had turned more profound—and now possessed shades of determination. The same pearl necklace glistened around her neck, and only a single strand of rebellious hair somewhat softened the cool veneer she displayed to the world. But not to him.

He wondered, for a moment, if the strand of hair was also the product of a calculated act, but quickly dismissed the notion. She was Ya’ara Stein; he knew her. He knew how she worked—and why. He had seen her break and bounce back, bounce back quicker than anyone else he knew, as if she were made of particularly durable material. But he sensed she was happy to see him, and he knew for sure that the emotion was mutual and sincere.

“Let’s get of here,” she said. “We’ll go to a pub, by the port. You’ll feel at home there.” She winked at him as if to say that an old sea dog like him could only feel at home close to the waves. And actually, there might have been some truth in that.

Ya’ara was in the habit of leaving her motorcycle at home on rainy days. Matthias had been on the back of the bike with her before, on the streets of Berlin and in Tel Aviv. He felt relieved when he saw they were walking toward a four-wheeled vehicle, and he offered a silent prayer of gratitude to the goddess of transportation who kept Ya’ara from riding a motorcycle in the wet. She might have grown up after all.

“So you’re in trouble, huh, Matthias?” Ya’ara said as she started the car and watched him settle into the seat next to her. He had finally dropped the fixed expression on his face that said everything was just fine, and she could see how concerned he really was.

“Yes, big trouble,” he responded plainly. “I need your help.”

• • •

The pub was dimly lit—just as such places are supposed to be, thought Ya’ara, who was actually somewhat familiar with the specific establishment. And at that twilight hour, it was empty, too. Two glasses of Leffe, a half liter each, stood on the counter in front of them. It could have been a movie set.

“Before we begin,” she said, “you should know that I’m no longer working for the company.” The “company” was the customary term for the Mossad, BND, CIA, and basically every intelligence organization out there. “I’ve been sort of freelancing of late, and my capabilities are very limited. There you have it”—she gestured at herself—“what you see is what you get.”

“And that’s a great deal,” Matthias responded. “In some ways, it may be better like this. I’m going to tell you a story, and I want you to tell me what you think. Be tough on me. Not the softy you always are.” He smiled.

“Some two years ago, I met a young woman by the name of Martina Müller. She was twenty-seven when we met. There was something refreshing about her, something cheeky and full of energy, something that attracted me. I know it sounds like a cliché, but she was different from all the other women I’ve met. We met by chance, at one of the bars nearby the port. She was there with a group of friends, all university students, and she stayed on after they left.”

Matthias was a man who had always safeguarded his solitude. He had never married, his serious relationships with women had been few and far between, and he had always been frighteningly discreet about them. It suited his life as a man of the sea, and it also suited the clandestine life he made for himself thereafter. And truth be told, it sat well with his character—withdrawn, hard, and averse to the luxuries in life. Although he spoke somewhat lightheartedly about his acquaintanceship with Martina, Ya’ara knew that the mere fact that he was sharing it with her was out of the ordinary. She gazed at him and waited for the rest.

“We struck up a relationship,” he continued. “I’m no longer at an age at which I feel required to inform headquarters about every new person I meet. I don’t need the pencil pushers from Pullach—sorry, they’re based in Berlin now—meddling in my personal life. You know I’m not one to enter into a committed relationship lightly; but despite her age, Martina proved to be charming and mature, and the connection between us soon turned serious. She even shared my love for the sea, although she always said she preferred the forest. Martina was working—or rather is working—toward her PhD in political science. She was researching the radical left of the 1960s and ’70s. She had delved very deeply into the subject and her life was her doctoral thesis. She herself was born after all that madness had died down, and she would often ask me to tell her about the period. About what things were really like. I told her that I was far removed from all that was happening at the time. I was a high school student in a small town on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and I joined the naval academy as soon as I could. After graduation, I lived mostly aboard ships. But she loved to sit with me in front of the big fireplace, cuddled up together on the sofa, and drink cognac or schnapps and tell me about the things she had come across in the archives and ask me questions. I was enchanted by her enthusiasm, even if the subject matter was of no particular interest to me. Yes, we moved in together four months into our relationship. She moved some clothes and a lot of books into my house. And her black laptop too, of course.”

“And you still haven’t informed headquarters about this now-serious relationship?”

“Exactly. Initially, I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to, and afterward I refrained from doing so because it was already too late by then; and honestly, no one has the right to poke his or her nose into my bedroom. Martina, obviously, was unaware of the work I do. I told her I was a customs official, and she simply sighed and said: ‘It’s not enough for me to be in love with an old man, but he also has to be a pencil pusher. A civil servant. Oh, well, I’m a little screwed up, that’s just me.’ She could be so charming—even when she was teasing me. She was a serious young woman, but she was also blessed with a childlike mischievousness that made me feel young again. I was head-over-heels in love, Ya’ara. I hadn’t felt like that in a very long time.”

“So what happened, Matthias? Why do you keep talking in the past tense?”

Matthias gestured to the bartender to refill their glasses.

“Because it all ended out of the blue,” he said. “One evening, just a month ago, we were both sitting in the library and reading, and she turned to look at me with tears in her eyes. I noticed that she wasn’t wiping them away, was letting them trickle down her cheeks, and then she said: ‘Matthias, I’m going, I’m leaving you.’ I didn’t understand what she was saying, I thought she was talking about an upcoming trip, I really didn’t grasp what was happening. ‘I’m leaving, Matthias. I have to, I’ve got no choice.’ ‘Why, sweetheart?’ I asked. ‘What’s happened? We love one another, we feel good together.’ And then something about her appeared to stiffen and harden, something in her posture, in the look in her eyes. Like she had sealed herself shut in an instant. ‘None of that matters,’ she replied. ‘It counts for nothing. It means nothing.’

“Right then, Ya’ara, she seemed to be an entirely different person. She went into the bedroom and emerged again with a sports bag full of her things. I was still sitting there, feeling like some invisible force had pinned me to my armchair. She gave me a kiss here, under my eye, and walked out of the house. She doesn’t have a car, she always got around by bicycle or by train. She used to say it was greener, good for the environment. But that night I saw that a car came to get her. I spotted it from the window but I was too much in shock to catch its license plate number. I went back to my armchair and sat, surrounded by my books, until morning came. I haven’t seen her since.”

“Did you look for her?”

“Yes, I went to the university. I asked about her. They, too, hadn’t seen her over the past few days. And when I went back at a later stage to ask again, they informed me that she hadn’t been there in several weeks. And then I ran her name through the office computer.”

“You mean you hadn’t ever run a check on her? You let her move in without ever making sure she was who she said she was?”

“You know something, Ya’ara? It simply didn’t occur to me to do that. She worked her way into my heart, and I didn’t want to put her or our relationship under a microscope. I wanted to shake off my natural suspiciousness and all the caution I’d been trained to exercise. And it seemed like the right thing to do, because we simply fulfilled one another, or so I thought at least. She told me that her parents were dead, and you know I come from a small family. You must understand, despite the age difference, we were well suited. I trusted her. I didn’t want to contaminate our connection by running a check through the BND computers.

“But when I did, I learned that we had nothing on her. Nothing at all. She had never interested us. We didn’t have a dossier on her. And truthfully? It’s not surprising. There are eighty million Germans out there. How many of them have dossiers? We’re not the Stasi. We’re not even the security service. So I wasn’t surprised to learn that she didn’t appear in our records. I was simply longing for her. And that longing accompanied me day after day. All day long. It didn’t disappear or diminish. I looked for her because if I could see her name on my computer screen, it would be a little like seeing her again. Like our connection hadn’t been severed completely. Do you understand?”

Ya’ara nodded.

“But her name wasn’t there. My computer screen remained blank. No search results. I ran a check through the security service’s database, too. A good friend there allowed me to use his computer. It goes against regulations, and requires coordination and forms and approvals, but he’s a friend, and we do those kinds of things sometimes. Nothing. She hadn’t strayed into the sights of our friends in Cologne either. Believe me, purely out of longing I began browsing through the Interior Ministry’s system. Just for a chance to see her picture from her ID card, her passport. And there I found her. She looked a little confused in her passport pictures—no makeup, like in a mug shot, coarse and hard. The pictures there show not even the hint of a smile, just a blank stare.

“I continued my search through the Interior Ministry database. I found the records relating to her parents, Angela and Rolfe. Rolfe Müller, Angela Rohl. Angela Rohl. The name Rohl sounded familiar to me. A simple web search. Angela Rohl. Turns out that Angela Rohl was the daughter of Klaus Reiner Rohl, the left-wing journalist and publisher. And Gertrude Meyer. I was familiar with the name Rohl, and I was surprised that Martina had never mentioned her grandfather. I assumed she must have had her reasons. I didn’t recognize the name Gertrude Meyer, but still it troubled me. I checked online and then through the archives of Die Welt. Gertrude Meyer never actually graced the headlines, but she did earn a certain degree of infamy—she was the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s finance chief. When the authorities flushed out Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, they apprehended Gertrude, too. She was slapped with a six-year prison sentence and served four and a half years behind bars. According to an article I read about her marriage, she did express remorse for her actions, albeit halfheartedly, but that’s no mitigation for her crimes.

“Are you getting what I’m telling you?” he snapped, “I, the head of the Hamburg station of the Federal Intelligence Service, fell head over heels in love with the granddaughter of a member of the most brutal and notorious band of terrorists in the history of the Federal Republic of West Germany.”

“It doesn’t mean a thing, Matthias,” Ya’ara said. “Why should you care? She is her own person, she’s not her grandmother. Martina is two generations away from the whole story. How could it have any significance?”

“It’s like, it’s like you falling in love with the grandson of George Habash’s finance chief. Or your son hooking up with the daughter of whatshisname, Rabin’s assassin . . .”

“Yigal Amir.”

“Yes, Yigal Amir.” The name of Rabin’s killer sounded odd in Matthias’s German accent.

“It’s not the same, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter. What does it matter if Martina is the granddaughter of a terrorist, or not even a terrorist, the woman who managed the finances of a terror group? It’s like being an accountant. And it doesn’t reflect badly on her. Or on you. Maybe she didn’t tell you because she was ashamed of them.”

“You know that’s not true. But it’s not just that. Her disappearance is troubling. My senses went to sleep somewhat when I was with her, but I’m wide awake now. And my intuition or my instincts . . . or, perhaps, some small detail I picked up on, is telling me that something is very wrong. This is not merely the bruised ego of an aging man. I smell danger.”

“Matthias, isn’t this the time to hang your head and humbly report the whole story to Berlin and let them figure out what’s going on?”

“Theoretically, yes. In keeping with procedures, that would be the right thing to do. That’s what I’d expect from others. But you have to understand, Ya’ara, it’s not something I can do. If there’s nothing to it, I don’t want them saying that lovesick old Matthias has started to see demons in places where demons have never been.”

Ya’ara muttered something in Hebrew about blowing things out of proportion, and Matthias frowned in response. “Forget it, it’s nothing,” Ya’ara said. “Go on.”

“And if there is anything to what I’m saying,” he continued, “it would spell the end for me. I got caught up like a fool in something I should never have begun in the first place. Not only did I fall pathetically in love, but out of all the young girls in the world, I had to choose the granddaughter of a dedicated member of the most despicable group of terrorists to operate on German soil since World War II. And, worse, I have no idea what’s going on, despite the fact that she was telling me the history of her family for nights on end in front of a blazing fire. Someone could easily come along and put two and two together and suspect me of cooperating with her.”

Ya’ara grimaced at him. From her vantage point, she could see that he hadn’t thought this through to the bottom yet. If she had gotten this as a case, it wouldn’t take her long to wonder whether Matthias, stuck in a dead-end job, felt rejected by those in the inner circle and, when this beautiful young woman came along, allowed her to twist him around her little finger and make him do things he shouldn’t do.

“Ya’ara,” he said, “Do you think there is a chance that she’s a Soviet honey pot? Do you think the SVR would mount an operation to recruit a frustrated officer from the German intelligence service . . . ?”

Ya’ara shook her head and took his hand. “Matthias, Matthias, I think you’ve gone way too far now. There’s nothing here, other than merely a gut feeling, and other than the fact that out of all the young and beautiful women in Germany you really did unknowingly choose the one with a rather dubious family heritage. Apart from that, there’s nothing to support your gut feeling. We have to get our hands on the facts. Without the facts, we’re just going to make ourselves paranoid. A type of paranoia spiced with melancholy. A surefire recipe for going off the rails.”

Matthias liked the fact that Ya’ara had started to speak in the plural. He knew she was on his side and already hooked, ready to help him. For the first time in weeks he knew he wasn’t alone in his predicament.

“Look,” she said to him, “I can be in Germany with a small team by next week. We’ll find her. She hasn’t disappeared off the face of the earth. And as soon as we know where she is, we’ll begin looking into what she is doing. But Germany is your territory and you have to find us a lead to follow. You said you have a good friend in the security service. They can locate cellular telephones, pinpoint where computers connect to the internet, track credit cards, review the records of the border control system and airline passenger lists. Enlist his help. Ask him to run all those checks discreetly, without opening an official case file for now. Tell him you’re acting on a hunch, that you don’t want to stir things up without anything to support your notion. He’ll help you. First things first, though, good friends help each other out. They hold back their questions for another time. And sometimes we don’t ask at all.”

She chose to return to the Dan Carmel via the road that ran alongside the sea rather than drive through the city’s downtown area. They made their way there in silence. The road wound steeply and, looking in the rearview mirror, she could see the old buildings turning ever smaller. Twisted pine trees painted the streets a dark green, and she thought about how close they were to the place where she had grown up. Close and far away, too. When she stopped outside the hotel, she stepped out of the car to say good-bye. There was a sudden sense of awkwardness between them. The next steps were clearly going to alter their relationship. Ya’ara pulled herself together first. She smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll take care of it. Everyone goes through times like this. It’s your turn now. And you’re not alone. When lone wolves band together, nothing can stand in their way. We’re already winning, even if it doesn’t look like it now.” There had always been something very tenderhearted about him, but now she was seeing Matthias in a moment of helplessness for the very first time. And witnessing him like that only made her even fonder of him. Sometimes the flaws and shortcomings are actually the things we love the most, she thought, somewhat to her surprise, as she made her way back to her cadets.