‘Well, you go first, then we’ll bloody well find out.’
She loathed him, he thought, because he had made her show her fear. He loathed her, he thought, because she would not let him help her conquer the fear.
He depended on the fastening of the screws that held the drainpipe to the wall and climbed. His shoes found the smallest indents in the stone. His fingers ached to breaking point. He lay on the tiles and his shoes found a hold in the old gutter. His breath came in sharp pants. There was lichen and moss on the tiles, in the gutter.
‘Do I bloody stay down here? Are you having your bloody afternoon sleep up there?’
He was old, stupid, fucked-up — had to have been to have committed himself to her. He wedged his knee and his thigh into the gutter. One hand to push into the gap of a broken tile and try to find a secure hold, one hand to reach for her. He felt her fingers in his, and pulled. He heaved her over the gutter and onto the tiles.
They crawled over them. The lichen and the moss gave them grip. There was the sound of loud, raucous music.
Going slowly, stopping, assessing where the grip was best, where the tiles were damp, treacherous. He pointed to the end of the roof, to the top of a rusted straight ladder.
They were above the window the music came from. He heard the whip crack of a tile breaking behind him and turned. There was something manic in her face. She was standing, swaying to the beat of the music, hips gyrating. She had come through the barrier of fear. She mocked him. Her hips moved as if she was a strip-show dancer.
He went down the ladder and didn’t stop to help her. It led to a flat roof. Another ladder at the far end. He heard her coming after him but did not turn to face her. The second ladder, in good condition, came down into the yard of a motor-repair business. He walked briskly towards the open gate, through the graveyard of Trabants and Wartburgs with the wheels off, bonnets up, interiors ripped out, past the mechanics. His chest heaved. She ran behind him, to catch him. They stood on the pavement.
Josh said, grim, as if it hurt, ‘You’ve made a mistake, a bad mistake.’
She caught his eyes, blazed at him, ‘Have I? What mistake have I made?’
‘He’ll break in there.’
‘So he breaks in.’
‘You left your coat.’
‘So I buy another coat.’
‘You left your coat for him to find, and I left mine. But in your coat were the names, your precious eye-witnesses. Your coat tells him you were there, the names tell him where you’re going.’
‘Does it?’ The laughter sparkled in her eyes.
‘That was your mistake.’
‘Was it?’ Her shoulders shook gently with the laughter.
‘It’s bloody serious.’
She took his hand. She gazed into his face. She held his hand across her breast. She ran her tongue over her lips. She forced his hand against the warmth and softness of her breast. She squeezed it tighter on the softness and warmth, and he felt the folded paper.
‘Put it there when you were asleep. Needed your sleep, didn’t you? I didn’t have to sleep.’
‘Well done, you did well.’
‘You didn’t do bad — for an antique.’
They ran towards Prenzlauer, for the labyrinth of streets and the shelter of the tower blocks between Moll Strasse and Karl Marz Allee.
‘When do we go to Rostock? Do we get a car? Car is fastest. Do we go now to Rostock?’
‘Shut up, can’t you?’ Josh panted. ‘Shut your bloody little mouth so that I can think.’
They ran to be clear of Saarbrucker Strasse, until they could run no more.
They had watched him ring the bell, walk back, look up, go again to the bell and keep his finger on it. They had watched him as he had stood clear of the street door, raised his foot, hit the door with the sole of his shoe. Raub had gasped. The door had swung open. Goldstein had thought that the door of his grandfather’s home would have been kicked in.
They had sat in the car in silence and waited.
The engine ran, the heater blew warm air on them.
He came back through the door. His face was ashen.
He walked towards the car and opened the back door, reached inside for his briefcase. They saw the blood on his knuckles.
Raub blurted, ‘You have not committed, Doktor Krause, an illegal act?’
Goldstein whispered, hoarse, ‘Did you not find her, Doktor Krause, or have you missed her?’
‘An illegal act, in our company, is quite forbidden.’
‘Is she running ahead of you, to Rostock?’
The face was set, savage. He took the briefcase, slammed the door behind him. He walked away. They watched in the mirror. He was walking towards the junction of Saarbrucker Strasse and Prenzlauer and he had the mobile phone at his ear.
They ran from the car and up the three flights of stairs. The door was open, angled because one hinge was broken free, and there was a smashed chair on the floor, as if it had been used to barricade the door. The food on the table was scattered. There were two coats thrown down on the rug in the centre of the room, a man’s and a woman’s, and all the pockets of each of the coats were pulled out. There was a photograph on the floor and the wreckage of a frame. The photograph had been torn to many pieces. They stood, rock still, in the centre of the room. The quiet as around them. The far door was open. In the kitchen, the window was open. Goldstein understood and leaned out. He was high above a concrete yard, above the washing lines, and he saw a smashed stone. He looked along the narrow platform below the window and saw the void from which the stone had fallen. He would not have done it, could not have gone along the stone platform. He stared down. His body shook with trembling. There was a man’s coat, she was not alone. If she had gone along that stone platform then she must have had the smell in her nose of evidence .
‘Get to the car. Telephone for the ambulance.’
They were behind the door. Their last refuge had been the space between the door and the refrigerator. Raub was bent over them. They held each other, their hands were together. Blood trickled down their faces.
Goldstein ran for the stairs and the telephone. Raub was close behind him with the two coats that had been on the rug. He did not give his name to the ambulance Kontrol.
They drove away.
Goldstein understood that they should be gone before the ambulance came, that they should not be involved in illegality.
Albert Perkins came off the telephone, the secure line, to London. He sat at the desk of the station head, used the man’s chair. He could be a pig when he wanted to. What the station heads posted abroad all detested was to have a man in from Vauxhall Bridge Cross who camped in their space, used it as if it were his own. At the station head’s desk, Albert Perkins riffled in the drawer and found the Sellotape roll. He sealed the two envelopes, the one containing the Iranian material, the other holding his report on progress concerning the matter of Tracy Barnes/Joshua F. Mantle. The station heads, in Albert Perkins’s experience, were from independent schools and good colleges at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They had come along well-oiled tracks, of connection and recommendation, to employment with the Secret Intelligence Service. They would detest him as a vulgar little man, a former tea-boy and one-time Library clerk, night- school educated, without pedigree . . . but the vulgar little man had scrambled his unlikely way up the promotion ladder and was now a London deputy desk head and, with tolerable satisfaction, had the rank on overseas staffers, and they’d not be permitted, ever, to forget it.
He smiled his superiority. ‘Just get them off to London, please, first courier you’ve got travelling over. That young fellow, the one straight out of kindergarten, I’ll need him up in Berlin. May have to sit on his hands for a few days, but I’ll have him there. Oh, yes, and I’ll need a Berlin flight soonest, hire car as well at the other end. You won’t forget those chocolates I mentioned, not too expensive. By the by, don’t go worrying about your Iran file, topping it up, it’s all in here. Th
ere’s a good chap.’
They were in the soundproofed bunker on the second floor of the embassy in Bonn. It was assumed that the steel-lined walls of the room would deflect the listening equipment that was presumably used by the BfV. It was always right to assume that respected allies employed their state-of-the-art electronics to eavesdrop on valued friends. Old Trotsky had known the truth of it, had said an ally had to be watched like an enemy. The station head, flushed, did the bidding, went to the outer office to instruct the station manager to arrange the courier, confirm a flight and a hire car, and to tell young Rogers, who was ‘straight from kindergarten’ with a first-class honours in ancient history and who was the second son of a brigadier general, that he was off to Berlin, open-ended. Albert Perkins finished the coffee that had been brought to him. He walked at a leisured pace to the door.
‘What you’re going to do — I’ve worked very hard for good contact relations here, are you going to wreck them?’
He smiled at the station head. ‘By the time I’ve finished here, your German friends, my German allies, will spit on the ground I’ve walked on.’
Asked with steeled dislike, ‘Am I privy — am I allowed to be told how long you’re in Berlin?’
‘Berlin is just transit. It’s Rostock where it’s at. I’ll be there.’
Dieter Krause drove fast. He had taken the autobahn 55.
He drove his own car, the BMW 7 series, that they had given him. It was six days since he had flown out from Tempelhof to London and in seven days he was booked on the flight to Washington. There was no speed restriction on the autobahn and he drove faster than 160 kilometres per hour, hammering in the outside lane. In those six days his world had fractured; within the next seven the fracture could be stressed to collapse point.
He went north. The autobahn would take him around the towns of Oranienburg and Neuruppin, it would skirt Wittstock, go past the Plauer See and the Insel See, where he had fished with Pyotr Rykov. It would bypass Gustrow where their families had camped at weekends, and Laage. He was going home, going to face the crisis in his world, going back to Rostock.
They called him as he drove, telephoned his mobile, as he had said they should.
He had the small scrap of notepaper on the seat beside him, with the names.
North of Neuruppin, the mobile rang — Klaus Hoffmann, aged thirty-six, formerly a Leutnant.
Klaus Hoffmann did not complain of ‘reassociation’. The merging of the two Germanys had been kind to him. He had served twelve years in the MfS, was fluent in Russian, English and Czech. He would have described himself as a pragmatist. The old life had offered opportunities, the new life offered further opportunities. He sold property, acting as a broker for Western companies and international corporations that looked to locate in the East. He had understood the old system and exploited it, he had mastered the new system and made it work for him. He was flaxen-haired, athletic, and tanned from his most recent visit to the Tunisian resorts. He could offer the companies and corporations a detailed knowledge of the necessary procedures to slice through bureaucracy in the matter of planning applications and in the business of gaining federal government grant-aid. He wavered in his business close to the line drawn by the law, crossed it, recrossed and crossed it again. He had knowledge of so many officials: he could provide introductions to those who might be slipped a small brown envelope and he could threaten those who would crumble at the prospect of the unveiling of dirt. Through bribery, through blackmail, he won access to those whose signatures were needed to approve planning permission and to grant funds. He had been taught well in the MfS. He had a fine house in the Wandlitz area of Berlin, once occupied by a senior economic planner. The old wife had gone, a believer in the regime that was washed out, a new wife had been acquired. He had the Mercedes, and investments in the overseas markets and in the safer German companies . . . What he had built was at risk. On the night of 21 February 1988, on attachment from Magdeburg to Rostock, working late, he had been called out by Hauptman Dieter Krause to a shit place on the coast. The kid, the spy, had been on the ground: he had kicked the head of the kid, the spy, he had helped to drag the body back to the trawler and he had helped to weight it. He stood to lose the good life. He confirmed by his car phone that he was coming to Rostock.
Near to Wittstock, Josef Siehl, who had held the rank of Unterleutnant, rang at last.
Josef Siehi, on the telephone, complained that it had not been straightforward for him to take time off work, he had had to beg his supervisor. Always, he complained. He had stopped at a filling station and used a public telephone to confirm that he was driving to Rostock.
Past the Insel See, the call came from Ulf Fischer, who had never been promoted beyond Feidwebel.
Ulf Fischer, waiting for a fare on Lange Strasse, telephoned Hauptman Dieter Krause from his taxi. It was a good place to wait, near to the Radisson Hotel, which was the best in Rostock, and close to the shops of Kropeliner Strasse. A good place to wait, but the waiting was long, few enough fares to be had from the near empty hotel and shops. He telephoned from his taxi to say that he would be at the rendezvous.
South of Laage, Gunther Peters, once a junior and unnoticed Feidwebel, finally called.
Gunther Peters telephoned from his car, ordinary and not ostentatious. He hoped to be on time at the rendezvous, but he was coming from Leipzig and the radio said there would be road works near to Potsdam. He lived in the seat of his ordinary and unostentatious Volvo car. He was a minimum of ten kilos overweight, aged thirty-eight now, and he was pasty pale. He did not run when he could walk. On the telephone he said at what time he hoped to reach Rostock.
Dieter Krause drove on, powering the big car, towards the city that was his home. They were all vulnerable. Each of them was as vulnerable and at risk as himself. Because they were vulnerable and at risk, they would all come that afternoon to the rendezvous in Rostock, as their Hauptman had ordered.
‘Why?’
They were beside the old Wall, spattered with ugly graffiti scrawl and with technicolour paint sprays. A short stretch had been left for the scrawlers and the sprayers.
‘Because I say so.’
They had walked for more than an hour. He never turned to her, as if he knew that she would follow him.
‘Why are we here?’
‘Because I say so.’
Across the road from the section of Wall, narrow concrete slabs topped by a heavy rubber moon, smooth and of too great a diameter to reach over, was a small circular window with a recessed metal grille, set in the façade of an old building. White and gold lilies were fastened to it. He read the name and the dates that were carved in the stone above the window: Harro Schulze-Boysen, 2.9.1909—22.12.1942. He stood in front of the flowers, gazed at them.
‘Why are we here?’
‘We are here so that we know why we are going to Rostock.’
She snorted. ‘That’s just ridiculous. You think I don’t know why?’
He said, staring up at the memorial, ‘There has to be a reason for going. When I’ve told you the reason, we will go to Rostock.’
Chapter Seven
SO, who was he?’
‘Harro Schulze-Boysen was a member of the Rote Kappelle, the Red Orchestra. The Communists were against the Nazis, therefore they all became Communists. They spied for the Communists, for ideology. When they were arrested by the Gestapo they were brought here. Schuize-Boysen was brought here.’
‘That’s history.’
‘They were in “protective custody”. At the end there was “special treatment”, days on end of torture. Finally, execution.’
‘What is it to me?’
She stood beside him, small and playing bored. He faced the open space, large enough for three, four football pitches. There was a raised mound in the centre of the space, surrounded by sparse grass tufted yellow in the carpet of frozen snow. On the far side of the mound were birch trees, gaunt from the winter.
‘What can you hear,
Tracy? Sorry, let me do that again. What can you not hear?’
‘That’s a stupid bloody question.’
‘You can hear traffic. We’re in the centre of a city, of course there’s traffic noise. There are no birds. Spring’s coming, birds are nesting. It’s big ground here, it’s where the birds should be, but there aren’t any birds. You can’t hear birdsong. It was called Prinz Albrecht Strasse. It’s where the Gestapo had their main Berlin office. It’s where Himmler worked, and Heydrich and Eichmann. It’s where they brought people who stood up, who shouted, who did not compromise. It’s when you feel the history in this country, when you can’t hear the song of birds.’
The place held him. He wanted to share the feeling of it. Gently, Josh took her arm and turned her round. She was scowling, as if she was tired and cold, as if she had no interest.
They faced the Wall. Below it, half excavated, was a sunken entrance wide enough to have taken a single car or truck. Either side of the entrance were the back walls and side walls of small, compartment rooms.
‘They were driven through that entrance. They would have been sweating with fear in the back of lorries and lying in shit and piss and vomit. The small rooms were the holding cells. The people were taken from those cells up into the main building, the top floors, for torture. They were brought back to the cells. They would have sat there, on the stone floors and they would have prayed, cried, for the release of death. They were not there by accident, Tracy. They chose to be there. They made the decision to stand up and to shout, not to compromise. They were ordinary people, from trade unions, from the civil service, from the ranks of junior officers, from the Church. For every man or woman in those cells there were nine hundred and ninety-nine men and women who did not stand up, did not shout, who compromised. If you were in the crowd, Tracy, if your mother and father were in the nine hundred and ninety-nine, would you want it raked over? Would you? You want the bulldozers out. You want it covered over. You want it hidden. Look up, damn you, look up at the Wall.’
He had his fist under her chin. He wrenched her head up so that she had to look above the cell block to the Wall.
The Waiting Time Page 14