The Contract

by Gerald Seymour

  The Union Jack fluttered in the last minutes before coming down from the flag pole. At the Guard House Carter explained that facilities had been arranged for him. He was expected and that brightened him, he had resigned himself to an hour kicking his heels while they checked him out. Ushered straight to the major's office, and he was left by himself to telephone Mawby in West Berlin. There wasn't much for him to say, only that he'd arrived, was installed, was groping his way around and would put in a detailed reconnaissance in the morning. And Mawby sounded confident, and said the Berlin team were in shape and raring to go. Bloody Mawby, never a doubt up his sleeve. Well, just the once, just the once at Holmbury on the eve of the launch. Must have been his menopause then, right out of character.

  When Carter came out of the room the major was waiting. An apology, the excuse that supper would be on the table at home, but if Mr Carter cared for a drink there was the NAAFI bar. Carter watched the major leave in his car, he'd never met a military man yet who was happy in the company of civilian intelligence.

  The bar was little more than a hatch surrounded by the decoration of the wall shields emblazoned with the insignia and mottoes of the army and air force units that had stopped over the years at the Roadhaus before the drive to Berlin. It was a wide, airy room, some tables for eating, some easy chairs. The requisite portraits of the Queen and her Consort and the carefully stacked piles of back numbers of Country Life and Woman's Own and Punch. Carter was back in the realm of the familiar.

  There were two men at the bar, elderly and black uniformed, white shirts and black ties, and two white crowned caps on the stool beside them.

  'Good evening, the name's Carter.'

  'How do you do, Charlie Davies.'

  'Pleased to meet you, Mr Carter, I'm Wally Smith.'

  They'd be good for some beers thought Carter, good for some company. His estimation was correct, his hopes were justified. For several minutes they chewed over whether it would rain in the next 24

  hours, whether at last the summer had come. They swapped winter anecdotes, how much snow there had been in southern England as against north-east Germany. They discussed the merits of the Stettiner Hof as a hotel, whether he could have done better. Gentle and pleasant conversation at the end of a piggish day.

  'You'll forgive me, Mr Davies, but the uniform stumps me. I haven't come across it before,' Carter said.

  'BFS . . . British Frontier Service . . . you're not alone, no one's heard of us. After the war we were up to 300 strong, but they've cut us so hard there's damn all lead left in the pencil. I'm called a Frontier Service Officer Grade Two, and there's three more that have Grade Three rank, that's all that's left along with a half dozen that do customs work for the forces on the Dutch border.' Charlie Davies spoke with a cheerful gloominess.

  'What do you do ?'

  'On paper it says that we're supposed to keep Chief Service Liaison Officer at Hannover informed of the day to day situation on the IGB .. .

  that's Inner German Border. We do that and we accompany all army and RAF patrols within five kilometres of the frontier,' Wally Smith chipped in. 'In effect we have to know every damned inch of it from the Baltic down to Schmiedekopf, and that's 411 miles. It's our responsibility to see that no idiot goes where he shouldn't and starts a bloody incident going.'

  'It's a fair old stretch of ground,' Carter said with sympathy.

  'We manage . . .' confidence from Davies.

  'Kind of. . .' doubt from Smith.

  'What line are you, Mr Carter?' Davies sipped easily at his beer.

  'Foreign and Commonwealth Office.'

  'Do you know a Mr Percy, we sometimes see him here?' Davies drained his glass.

  'Adam Percy, from Bonn, you could say we're colleagues.'

  It had been done easily, the establishment of credentials, the presentation of Carter's pedigree. The talk moved on to civil service pay, the prospect of pensions being linked to inflation indexes. All were men of a common age and experience in their careers. Davies and Smith had bought a round, Carter had reciprocated.

  'You'll be around for a few days, Mr Carter?'

  'A few days, yes.'

  'We're here most evenings, if you're at a bit of a loose end, if you're on your own and you'd like a bit of a natter.'

  'That's very kind of you. I'll be using the communications tomorrow evening, round the same time . ..'

  'Probably see you then . . . You'll forgive us, it's been a long day. There was a flap on south of here this morning. A silly bugger like me should know better than to get up and take a look

  'What sort of flap ?'

  'Two kids had a go at the wire. One made it, God knows how, bypassed the trip wires for the SM 70s ... the automatic guns on the fence . . . the other kid didn't have the luck. They're shitty bastards over there, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, they had the kid who was hit hung on the wire for an hour .. . his bloody leg was off. Looked about sixteen ... I didn't see the one who came over, the BGS had whipped him away.'

  'Doesn't sound very friendly,' Carter said quietly.

  'If they'd stuck a transfusion in for him they might have saved the kid.

  They don't hurry themselves, not when some poor fucker . . . you'll excuse the French, Mr Carter . . . not when he's hanging on the wire. Not very friendly, as you say, that's why I've been taking a few jars tonight.

  Like I said, we'll see you again.'

  Carter walked back from the Roadhaus to the hotel. He walked briskly in the darkness, and he thought of Johnny. 30 miles down the road, behind the Inner German Border, Johnny upon whom they all depended.

  He sat in the wide, high entrance hall of the hotel, deep in a black leather armchair and faced the 3 doors of the lifts.

  More than 45 minutes he had been there, waiting calm and detached, rested by an afternoon sleep and a bath. He would stay there and watch, half the night if necessary. The old photograph trampled its picture in his mind.

  Johnny would know him when he came.

  There was a chorus of accents and languages in the chairs around him.

  The coaches and officials of a basketball team from Bratislava who were waiting for their bus to take them to a reception. The excited chatter of three Libyan students who talked noisily and nervously because the surroundings were strange to them. A soprano singer and her accom-panist from Vienna. A trades union delegation from Cracow. A group of Red Army officers in their walking out best uniforms who celebrated with vodka the promotion of a colleague. The sounds eddied at his ears and Johnny was oblivious to them.

  Erica Guttmann came first.

  Tall, slim, fair haired and tanned skin. Wearing a dress for the evening.

  Distracted as she stepped from the lift, con- cerning herself with holding the doors open so that they should not close on the old man who followed her. No hesitation for Johnny. The fast, quick clarity of recognition, as if he'd seen him yesterday.

  An old man, a little bowed and stooping, but with a firm stride. The suit hung on him as if age had wasted his stomach and dropped his shoulders and the shaping of the jacket and trousers was now obsolete. A domed, wrinkled forehead and wisps of white hair, metal rimmed spectacles. As Willi had said he would be, as the boy had described.

  Erica had slipped her hand through the angle of her lather's arm. She swept the hall with her eyes and found no satisfaction and whispered in her father's ear. He nodded agreement and the two of them went carefully and in step to the side of the reception desk and stood, examining and quizzical, in front of the framed and printed sheet that carried the timetable of Magdeburg railway station.

  He was fast out of his chair and across the hallway.

  Johnny hovered behind them, listened and watched as the old man adjusted his spectacles to peer at the close print, and Erica's fingers darted at the relevant information.

  'The one at 11 is too late. It has to be this one, just before 9 ... it goes at 8.52 ... I will book the call tonight for us to be woken in the morning She led
him away, spared no look for Johnny, left him the freedom of the timetable. He leaned forward to see the place where her fingers had played. The 8.52 via Oschers- leben and Halberstadt to Wernigerode.

  Willi had talked of Wernigerode. Willi had talked of the annual pilgrimage to the town in the Hartz mountains. It suited Johnny well, was very adequate for the plan that had been conceived at Holmbury.

  Johnny moved back into the centre of the hall. It took him some moments to find again the Guttmanns, father and daughter. Their backs were to him and they were talking to another girl and with a stout giant of a man. Johnny saw the glove and the scar. The girls talked fast and with the animation of friends. The men stood stiff and apart and seemed to spar with their words, in the guise of strangers. The girls in front, the foursome headed towards the glass doors of the restaurant. Time to find a table for one, johnny, not too near the band. Time to try the food, lad.

  Johnny smiled up at Comrade Honecker and followed into the restaurant. Otto Guttmann had seemed older than he had expected. At the finish line of his career and that would be polite. And he was going to have a bastard time from tomorrow. Going to be wracked so that it hurt, deep pain, deep agony, because that was the plan that Mawby had endorsed. That was the way it had to be, wasn't it? Otto Guttmann was to be bent and crushed and broken. You're a nasty bastard, Johnny. Right. .

  . and that's why you're here, that's why you were contracted to drive an old man half out of his mind with grief and dreams.

  The restaurant seemed full and Johnny stood in the doorway and searched for an empty chair and tried to catch the eye of the head waiter.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Johnny stood outside the station entrance and looked across the square towards the International Hotel. He was early and his return ticket to Wernigerode was already in his pocket. Otto Guttmann would be late, because he was on holiday and he would be coming in a hurry and probably in an ill temper, and the girl would be fretting. And they would be confused and Johnny would be calm. That was the way it must be, for every hour and every minute that stretched before him in Magdeburg.

  Johnny, with the reins tight in his fists.

  Now 8.30 and the workers were scurrying for their offices and shops, for their desks and their cash counters and their construction sites. The slogan in front of him, 12 feet off the ground and 30 feet long, read 'DDR

  30 - Werk des Volkes fur das Wahl des Volkes!' Impossible to know how many believed in the collective exhortations for greater striving and effort, impossible for Johnny to gauge how many of those brushing and bustling past him believed in the doctrine of 'the work of the people for the welfare of the people'. Don't they have any selfish buggers here? Just a myth, or is there really a Utopia that confronts capitalism? . .. They wore pressed and laundered clothes and dulled tired faces.

  The presence of the Red Army at the station emphasised for Johnny the width of the bridge that he had crossed at Obeisfelde. Send them into apoplexy, wouldn't it? Johnny Donoghue, former holder of the Queen's Commission, former officer of the British Army Intelligence Corps, currently under contract to the Secret Intelligence Service, standing on the pavement outside the Hauptbahnhof of Magdeburg and running his mental check over their units and dispositions. Have a heart attack, wouldn't he, the Soviet military security commandant for the city? He saw the long serving men with their wide caps far back on their heads and badges of rank on their shoulders and their baggy trousers and floppy blouses. He saw the new recruits, some with the Asian tan and the narrow eyes of the far eastern territories and whose uniforms were poor fitting and whose boots were polished.

  The Russians seemed to Johnny to dominate the station with their manpower and their transport. But this was what he had been told he would see, because this was a command area and Pierce had dinned that into his memory. Johnny saw the civilians thread and weave between the foreign troops, watched them ignore each other. Quit the rubbernecking, Johnny, that's the way you're noticed, that's the way the questions get asked. He walked away, turned his back on the military movement.

  It was as he had thought it would be.

  Otto Guttmann trailing his daughter. They came past him, Erica leading by two strides and heading straight for the ticket counter and leaving her father to rummage in his pocket for coins for a newspaper.

  She would feel the burden of him, wouldn't she? Too fine a girl in her looks and bearing, as she stood in line in haughty impatience for the tickets, to be anchored to an old man. He wondered how they paced their evenings, what common ground they found for conversation. He swatted the mood away and set off in a leisured pursuit down the passageway to the platforms.

  Across the track a troop train was loading. Children and wives, prams and parcels being stowed up the high steps and into the carriages. Men of the Soviet Military Police and the local Schutzpolizei overseeing.

  Johnny the interloper. The families of a Signals Regiment returning to the Ukraine.

  The loudspeakers blared the warning of the arrival of the train for Wernigerode.

  Erica had her arm at her father's elbow. Johnny stood close and saw their heads merge as the girl whispered in her parent's ear. She laughed and he smiled, their crisis of departure was overcome. The train pulled into the platform and Johnny watched them climb on board and then walked to the next carriage.

  He felt in his pocket for the envelope that contained the photographs, was reassured by the reminder of their presence and settled in a seat.

  Sir Charles Spottiswoode drove fast along the A3 to London. The Volvo had brought him many column inches of comment and publicity in the national media after his well-docu- mented claim that the British motor industry produced vehicles of such poor workmanship that he, a patriot, had been forced to take delivery of a foreign produced motor. The Member for Guildford rejoiced in the brickbats that had been hurled at him, revelled in the abuse heaped at his doorstep.

  But those who saw him as little more than an amusing by- product of public life had misread their man. The aggression and bitterness that haunted him were cultured in privacy. When he bit, he bit deep. He was not ignored.

  The Prime Minister was seeing him that evening. In his mind he rehearsed the story that he would tell of the removal from a private house of a terrified young man at the hands of the louts of the Intelligence Service. He would demand the answer to his question of who sanctioned such behaviour, and by what legal right. The reputations of men previously unaccountable to Parliament would suffer, they would cringe away from the affair. That he guaranteed.

  The team of Schutzpolizei had not concerned themselves with Johnny.

  He'd felt the nerves wriggle and fidget in his body as they came into the carriage. Two men and two women. Navy blue trousers and navy blue skirts. Sexless powder blue blouses. Snug little pistols holstered at the waist; East German manufacture and a copy of the Soviet Makarov that in its turn was the copy of the West German Walther PP. Johnny tensed, slid his hand to the passport that he had collected from Reception before leaving the hotel and that carried the stamp of the Volkspolizei opposite his visa page. All trains going into the border areas were checked and under surveillance. Wernigerode was less than a dozen miles from the frontier, just routine. They had moved slowly, scraping their eyes over the passengers in the carriage. By the time that they were level with him Johnny had seen the pattern that they followed. The teenagers, the young ones, the kids with anoraks and rucksacks, they received attention.

  Those who were going into the hills and forests towards the frontier, who were walking and camping in the Hartz, they were asked for their papers and tickets. The kids who had never known another life, who were ignorant of another colour, they were the risk. They were the runners.

  Johnny stared out of the window. He repeated the catechism to himself. Not to take an interest, not to follow the gruff questioning and the hesitant answers. He must detach himself, follow the lead of people around him who closed their ears and eyes and minds. He wanted to smile and s
uppressed it. Out in the field, flat and stretching to a distant horizon was a corral of wire and floodlights and imprisoned inside was a single engine crop spraying aircraft. One last year, one this year . . . the way to the West at tree top height . . . the hope that the frontier guards weren't too accurate with the MPiKMs and the machine guns in the towers. Take a bit of nerve to lift a plane and fly out, a matter of courage and a fair load of luck. Up you, Comrade Honecker, because there were people here with nerve and courage and luck, and that's why a little aircraft has to have wire of 10 feet in height stretched round it. The man on the seat opposite Johnny would also have seen the plane, and his eyes were blanked and expressionless. Johnny pondered on what he thought of the sight, and had no possibility of knowing.

  The Hartz gleamed green and lofty above the agricultural plain. He mused away the last minutes of the journey and was at the carriage door when the train stopped at Wernigerode station.

  Otto and Erica Guttmann were not difficult to follow. Their pace and their steps were predictable.

  Up the hill and towards the old, close knit town.

  Into the Markt Platz where the hotels were and the tables and chairs were set and the stalls for the sale of vegetables. They had a coffee and Johnny surveyed them from a distance.

  Along the gentle climb of the Burg Strasse, where the houses were timbered and painted, where the church was ageing and weeded, where the tourists were Party members and union officials and factory workers and holidaying with their families at the FDGB hostels.

  By the bridge and over the shallow river. Johnny kept a gap of 30 to 40