‘Steady on, Mantle. No call to be wound up, stay calm. Tell him that, Tracy, shouldn’t ever lose your calm . . . Actually, I’m not with the hare and I’m not with the hounds. Done my bit in the market-place, very satisfactorily. I’m here to watch the chase.’
‘Get off my back.’
The queue shuffled forward a pace.
Perkins said, ‘I’ve warned you once, but I’ll warn you again, the last time. You go to Rostock and you will upset people. For those people there is a great deal at stake. For Hauptman Krause — by the by, Tracy, his scars are knitting quite well — at stake is his future. He’s in from the cold, the future looks comfortable, there’s no shortage of federal money in his wallet. Don’t think he’s going to hand that over, without a fight, for ten years in the Moabit gaol. His former underlings — they’ll be verminous — will have built new lives, too, and if Krause goes to the Moabit gaol then they go with him, as accessories to murder, and they won’t take kindly to it. There’s the BfV, my esteemed colleagues, who reckon that Hauptman Krause is their invitation card to top- table intelligence evaluation, and they’ll tell you that for too many years we and the Yankees have treated them as kitchen staff. They’ll not be pleased to see him wiped away. They will close their eyes and turn their backs on little matters of illegality. It will get bad up there in Rostock.’
The queue slouched forward another pace. Josh didn’t turn to face her, he did not look to see the effect on Tracy Barnes of Albert Perkins’s poisonous tone.
Perkins said, ‘You should know, the man I report to, he asked me what would happen if you, Tracy, were damn fool enough to go to Rostock. Only my opinion, I told him that first they’d warn you, very clear, no misunderstanding, and if you persisted they would rough you — that’s a quick ride to hospital Casualty — and if you still went forward and threatened them and it’s their freedom or your life, they’ll kill you. I hope you listen to the radio, you always should when you’re abroad, keeps you in touch. It only made two or three lines. An elderly couple beaten up in their home on Saarbrucker Strasse, unknown assailant, unknown motive. That’ll be the warning. After the warning they’ll go more physical, then they’ll kill. You go to Rostock and you’re on your own.’
Her voice, behind him, was clear, matter-of-fact.
‘Two persons, adults, one way, to Rostock.’
He saw the slow smile, so bloody cold, break at Perkins’s mouth.
He turned towards Tracy. She was shovelling banknotes out of her purse, and the computer was spitting out the printed ticket. Her face was quite set. He did not know whether Perkins had frightened her, or whether she hadn’t even bothered to listen.
Through the late afternoon, through the evening, Dieter Krause sat in his car and watched the slip-road. It was at Rostock Sud, the most direct turn-off from the autobahn into the city. Of course, they could have come off at the Dummerstorf-Waldeck slip-road up the autobahn, or they could have driven on to the Rostock Ost turn-off, but this was the best place for him to wait. He had the heater on in the car. In between the cigarettes he took a strip of gum and chewed incessantly, and every few minutes he used his sleeve to wipe the car’s windscreen. He looked for a hire car — a Ford, an Opel or an Audi. There were high lights over the slip-road, bright enough for orange day. He would recognize her, but he had no face, no build, no features for the man travelling with her. He would know her if he saw her, her face had been close to him. He could recall each bone and each muscle of her face. He watched the cars brake, swerve and slow as they came off the autobahn and onto the slip-road. When he had headed the section on the second floor at August-Bebel Strasse, when he had targeted environmentalist shit or the crap people with religion, then he would have had the authority to call out twenty men for a surveillance operation of such priority. He was disciplined. He studied each car for Berlin plates, and every woman in those cars. He looked for the gold of her hair and the small face and the bright eyes. The cigarette, the latest, was stubbed out, and he took the gum again from the dashboard beside the radio where he stuck it each time he smoked.
In the apartment on Saarbrucker Strasse, when the old people had found their last hiding place behind the kitchen door, when he had beaten them in his frustration, the wind and the cold had come through the opened window. He had seen the platform of stone and the distance of the platform between the window and the drainpipe, and he had looked down to the concrete of the yard. If she had gone along that platform to the drainpipe, so high above the concrete, then she was hard. If she was hard, then, certainty, she would come to Rostock. The headlights of each car, each truck and lorry, speared into his face, dulling his sight, as he searched for her.
‘What confuses me, Mr Perkins, you warned him and you spelled out the dangers of the course he was following.’
‘How is that confusing, young fellow?’
‘Frankly, Mr Perkins, I don’t see what more you could have done to persuade him to pack up and go home.’
‘Are you so very naïve?’
‘The policy objective, Mr Perkins, is fulfilled by him going, but you were telling him to quit, walk away.’
‘That’s the nature of the beast. The beast is embittered, contrary, hostile. You tell the beast to go back and he will go forward, tell him to go right and he will go left, tell him the colour is black and he will say it is white. Tell him not to go...’
‘Then you manipulate him?’
‘Quite right. You can always get an idiot to dance like a marionette. Part of the job is jerking the strings, you’ll learn that
He’s predictable. But you’re wrong to focus on old Mantle. It’s the young woman who’s interesting.’
‘Is it real, the danger?’
‘Oh, yes, very real. As real as the minimal enthusiasm there will be from our friends and allies to accept evidence unless it’s served up cordon bleu. What have they done about the Stasi crimes? Listen, Erich Mielke was minister for state security for more than forty years, responsible for the psychological destruction of thousands of lives, responsible for the taking of hundreds of lives, and he was given six years’ imprisonment for killing two policemen at an anti-Nazi demonstration in nineteen thirty-one, believe it. Nothing, for their convenience, in his time as head of that despicable organization, was deemed criminal so they raked back sixty-six years, a farce. Hans Modrow was the last Communist prime minister, sat for years at the Politburo meetings that legalized repression, and his only crime was falsifying voting results, suspended sentence. A Stasi major presented the Carlos terrorist group with the bomb detonated at the Maison de France in West Berlin, three deaths, three persons murdered, as a direct result, and he was given six years, out by now. A hundred victims shot trying to scale the Wall, two border guards given decent sentences for firing at point-blank range on unarmed youngsters, nine suspended sentences so they walked free, thirteen acquitted. There was murder, unpunished, assassination squads roaming abroad and unpunished, wholesale theft of monies sent to relatives living in the East, unpunished, torture in the Stasi cells, unpunished. They don’t want to know who was guilty, they want it forgotten. If she is awkward and if she threatens, then it gets dangerous.’
He left the boy from kindergarten at the outer door of the hotel. He wouldn’t see him in the morning, would be off early. He wanted to walk around Savignyplatz, to be on his own, to sit in a café late in the evening and hear the talk around him, as he had walked and sat long ago when Berlin had belonged to him.
In his taxi, the ‘Free’ light off, Ulf Fischer watched the forecourt of the Rostock Hauptbcihnhof.
Twice, passengers off the trains had sworn at him because he would not take them. It was a hard life, driving a taxi in Rostock, and it hurt to turn away money. It was not his own taxi, and when he had paid for its hire, and the hire of the radio, and the fuel and the insurance, there was little enough left at the end of each week. He was a warm man, though, not greatly intelligent but cheerful. Once or twice a month, he was a professional mou
rner. The ethic of the family had broken down in the new Germany - money ruled, old people died alone. They needed, the old-and-alone dead, a small show of affection at their funeral. He made an oration at such people’s funerals, spoke well of them when no one else did. It brought a little more money into his life — as did the earnings of his wife, who went five evenings a week to clean trains at the Hauptbahnhof — but too little to hold the love of their two sons. His boys were beyond his control, without discipline, were in love with the American culture. In his plodding way, the way that he had learned from twenty-seven years in the MfS, he tried to merge into the new life, but he had wept the night that the mob had broken into the Rostock barracks building.
He had been the driver for Hauptman Dieter Krause. On the night of 21 November 1988, he had driven the Hauptman to Rerik, at panic speed. He had been the driver and confidant of Dieter Krause, he had done shopping for Eva Krause when her work at the shipyard did not allow her time and when the Hauptman was tied to his desk, he had been like an uncle to the little child, Christina. That night, his boot had been across the throat of the kid, the spy, to steady the head and make it an easier shot for the Hauptman. He had last seen Hauptman Krause in Rostock nine months before, and the Hauptman had walked past him and not seemed to recognize him, but there must have been some reason for it.
He had been at the station since the late afternoon, and all through the evening. He knew the times of the trains arriving from Berlin/Lichtenberg, and when each train was due he left his taxi and went to stand at the steps to the tunnel from the platform so that he could see the faces that passed him. He had been given a good description of the face that he watched for. Hauptman Krause had always been careful with detail. There would be a man with her, and Hauptman Krause had told him that the man would be about 1.85 metres tall and might weigh about 90 kilos. The Hauptman had found the man’s coat and made his estimates from it. It was English made. Later, after the last train had come, if the young woman and the man were not on the train, he would go to the meeting that the Hauptman had called. He still did not understand why the Hauptman had walked past him those months before on Lange Strasse.
There was a rap on the passenger window.
He saw the skinny, poor face of Unterleutnant Siehi. He unlocked the door for the Unterleutnant to join him. It was necessary, in these days, to lock the taxi’s doors while it was parked at the kerb, because of the violence of the new bastard undisciplined skinheads of the city. They shook hands formally. In the taxi, the Linterleutnant ate a sausage with chill from a small polystyrene tray with a plastic fork. It was not possible for Ulf Fischer, the Feidwebel, to tell Josef Siehl, the Unterleutnant, that he did not permit food to be eaten in his taxi. The next train from Berlin would be arriving in six minutes, and two hours after that the last train of the night would arrive.
She slept.
The train clattered north in the darkness. They were alone in the compartment. Ahead, in other compartments, were the Scouts with their adults, singing lilting songs in treble voices. Behind them the compartments were used by drab elderly people, their small cheap suitcases on the floor by their feet. He had the window blind up, and when the train slowed, the light from the carriage spewed over the snow-specked ground beside the track.
She slept, so peaceful, so gentle, her shoes kicked off, her feet on the seat and the weight of her body against the carriage wall.
The light showed him the frozen ice at the rim of the lakes beside the track and once he caught the eyes of a deer startled by the approach of the train. They went through the small towns and villages where there were illuminated advertising hoardings for new cars and new supermarkets and new soft drinks from America. They went past an old barracks of the Soviet Army, light and shadow from the train meandering over the vandalized buildings where once the big tanks had been serviced. It was Mantle’s nature to look out over the barracks. In the days when he had been stationed in Germany, days that were twenty years gone, on a few occasions he had been tasked to take the British military train from Helmstedt to Berlin. Every time it ran, most days of the week, an I Corps sergeant had travelled on it. From the West, across the Soviet zone, to West Berlin. An hour in West Berlin, then back on the train across the Soviet zone, through Potsdam and Brandenberg and Genthin and Magdeburg, peering over the walls and through the trees at Soviet camps, at tanks, at artillery, trying to spot cap badges that would say a new unit had arrived. Pitiful, small beer. He now rated the work of I Corps, scratching for information on the military enemy hidden behind the great fence of wire, mines and watch-towers, as pathetic.
She slept without care.
The train rolled on the track. Cattle trucks had come this way. They went by the town of Furstenberg, sandwiched between lakes, ringed by forests of straight pine. Going slower, pulled by steam, the cattle trucks had come, doors bolted. Would there, then, have been young people on the blacked-out platform at Furstenberg, waiting for a train north, or a train to Berlin, who had watched the cattle trucks slink noisily by, smelt the bodies and heard the cries? Would there, now, be old people on the bright platform at Furstenberg, waiting for a train to Rostock, or a train south, who remembered the roll of the cattle trucks, the smell and the cries? Past Furstenberg, as the train gathered speed, he saw the small narrow branch line disappear into the web net of the forest. The branch line had carried cattle trucks to Ravensbruck.
She slept beside him, as if his history was not important to her. He let her sleep.
West of the city, from the Reutershagen district, a narrow, unlit road straddled open ground and ran towards a wooded area of birch trees. Klaus Hoffmann had sited the pit and dug it seven years and four months before. In darkness, using only a small- beam pencil torch to guide him, he blundered and stumbled away from his car towards the dark outline of the trees. He carried with him a short-handled spade, kept in the boot of his car every winter as precaution against being marooned in blizzards. He remembered the track and the line of the trees ahead. He had taken trouble that night to site the pit. The path meandered close to a ditch. He had to stay on the path until he reached the line of trees, then backtrack for twelve long paces, a dozen metres.
Standing on that point, his feet either side of the scraped mark, he must search with the torch beam for the shattered tree across the drainage ditch. The bearing he must find was eighteen paces from the mark towards a direct line with the shattered tree. There was ice on the ditch. He tried to jump it but one leg fell short and the ice gave, cracked like a pistol shot beneath him. Frozen ditch water up to his knee, soaking his trouser leg and his sock, ifiling his shoe. Klaus Hoffmann swore. He pulled himself, heaved his body, scrabbling at the grass fronds, up the bank of the ditch. He made the measurement. His shoe squelched.
The night, over seven years before, that the mob had come into the building on August-Bebel Strasse, was the night he had come and made the siting and dug the pit. He breathed hard. He rammed the blade of his spade down into the earth. He dug, and failed to find the rubbish bin. He took another pace, on the same line, dug again and failed again. He dug the third time, his foot cold and sodden. The blade of the spade hit the buried plastic cover of the bin. It was near to an hour after he had left his car that Hoffmann lifted the top from the bin. As he had left it, the guns and the files were wrapped in greased paper and in sealed plastic bags. Wrapped against the wet were three Kalashnikov rifles, the magazines and bullets in smaller plastic bags knotted at the throat, hand grenades and gas canisters, four pistols and more ammunition, and the two shopping bags that held the files. He took the Makharov pistols and the ammunition. He searched for the names on the files, as he had been told to, and selected those that were required. He closed the rubbish bin, covered it again and stamped down with his cold numbed foot on the earth. He tore up grass, yellowed in his torch beam, and scattered it over the scar on the ground.
She moved. She did not open her eyes. She swung, so casual, still sleeping, away from the compartment w
all. For a moment her body, her head, wavered upright, then she slumped, her head against his shoulder and her body against his arm.
He could not move. If he moved he would wake her. He thought it would be criminal to wake her.
The short spread of her hair was splayed against his collarbone. She slept on and the train gathered pace, its motion rocking her head on his shoulder. Josh Mantle felt a great tenderness towards her. He could have woken her, thanked her, because in sleeping against him he thought she showed her trust. . . Coming back from the specialist, after the diagnosis, as he had driven the car, Libby had rested her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes, and that, too, had been a gesture of trust. His arm was numb but he did not dare to shift it, to risk disturbing her sleep. She breathed smoothly. There was no panic in her breath, no nightmare. He saw the cleanness of her face, clear skin. He smelt the chilli sauce. He could not imagine living with himself if he had abandoned her. He was old enough to be her father. He felt as if it were demanded of him that he should protect her.
She slept. His arm ached. Her head was on his shoulder.
Coming fast off the autobahn, on to the slip-road, Gunther Peters saw the parked car. He flashed his lights. The headlamps lit the face of the Haupt man, whom he had not seen since the collapse of the regime. He pulled in his small Volvo behind the BMW. He was given the description, height, weight, build and hair colour, told what he should look for, and told at what time he should leave the slip-road and come to the meeting place.
The Han ptman was gone, driving away into the night. Peters settled low in his car, and watched and waited.
There had been an Armenian who had taken money up front for the supply of spare engine parts for Mercedes cars, and not delivered, and the Armenian’s body was now deep in an earth-fill site where rubble from the rebuilding of Leipzig was dumped. There had been a businessman from Stuttgart who had claimed to have the right contact in the Ukraine for the supply of infantry weapons, mortars, machine guns and wheeled 105mm howitzers, and there had been a suspicion that he doubled with the BfV; he had gone, weighted, into the Rhine river at Bingen, west of Wiesbaden. The Armenian, before he had died, without his fingernails and with a pain-shaking hand, had written the account number at the Zurich bank and the letter of authorization for its transfer. The businessman, before he had gone, alive, gagged, into the river, had spelled out in staccato gasps the limited information he had passed to the agency.
The Waiting Time Page 17