He watched the cars come past him on the slip-road. He thought the Hauptmcrn a fool to have killed the kid, the spy, before interrogation. Now the history of that night was churned up again, debris left on a beach, stones turned over by a plough. If he was threatened, he killed.
He watched for the face of the young woman who had been described for him by Hauptman Krause, a fool.
He checked his watch.
The feeling in his arm, against which she slept, had died. His shoulder was warmed by her head.
He felt almost a sense of fear because she slept against him as if she gave him her trust, and yet ahead of him was the earning of the trust.
He eased into the seat beside her.
‘You are late.’
‘I came when I could.’
‘You have missed most of the game.’
‘I came as soon as it was possible.’
‘If she wins this game she has the match.’
She sat high in the stand beside her husband. If Christina survived to the final for under fifteens of MecklenburgVorporren, and won, she would go to the under-fifteens all-Germany championship at Munich. The coach said that Christina had the ability. The club where the coach worked was a thousand Deutschmarks a year. The coach’s time was priced at seventy-five DMs an hour. When they had paid for the membership, the entry and his time, Ernst Raub had written the cheque. Without the cheque from Raub, her daughter would not be playing in the championship for under fifteens of Mecklenberg-Volpommern. She served for the match in the first round of the championship.
‘The problem, it is still there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The woman, has she come to Rostock?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you know?’
‘It is about the collection of evidence.’
‘You told me that all the files were destroyed. What evidence?’
‘There were witnesses, that is the problem. The ifies were destroyed, I do not know if she can find the witnesses.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I have to finish with the problem before I go to America.’
Their voices murmured. They watched their daughter below. They applauded the point that was won. Eva heard the quiet, cold certainty of her husband’s voice.
‘If you cannot...?’
‘Cannot what?’
‘If you cannot finish with the problem before you go to America . . . ?‘
‘If I cannot finish with the problem, if she finds the witnesses, if the witnesses talk to her, then I am named. .
‘Then?’
‘I am arrested. I am tried, am convicted. I would go to prison.’
‘You will fight?’
The past clung to her. The past was Pyotr Rykov. And the past was also her husband coming home in the night with the wet salt smell on his clothes and the sand on his shoes and undressing in silence. The past was poverty, boredom, when she had been unemployed because the FDGB had closed down as an irrelevance, and it was four years of him struggling to find work. The past was him seeing the picture in the newspaper of a Russian general, and behind the General had been Pyotr Rykov, and driving to Cologne to offer himself, and coming back with Raub and the young Jew, and the move into the new refurbished home in the Altstadt near to the Petrikirche and the new clothes and the new furnishings. The past was ghosts. . . The overhead smash shot, the victory, their daughter leaping in celebration on the court with arms and racquet raised . . . All in the past if a young woman came to Rostock, searched for, and found, witnesses.
‘You ask me if I will fight. Yes, I will fight.’
He was gone from the seat beside her.
The train slowed. He broke the dream. They had gone through Maichin and were past Teterow. He moved his arm, edged it from behind her body. The train lurched on its brakes. Her eyes opened, blinked, stayed open. Her face was close to his. She didn’t shift her body from against his.
‘How long have I been there?’
‘A bit less than an hour.’
‘Enjoy it, did you?’
Josh said quietly, ‘I didn’t want to wake you.’
‘Got a thrill? Grope me, did you?’
He thought trust was beautiful and precious, and that he was old and stupid. He jerked up off the seat. He pulled her rucksack and his own bag down from the overhead rack. He did not care to look at her. He did not know which of her was real. The train was slowing, crawling. He did not know which of her was the core, when she was asleep and lovely, when she sneered and was ugly. Was he trusted, was he a convenience? Out of the window, slipping by, were small homes.
‘Is this Rostock?’
‘This is Laage, about fifteen miles from Rostock.’
‘Why’d you wake me?’
He felt the anger and tossed the weight of the rucksack onto her legs.
‘Do the obvious and that’s the way to get hurt. The obvious ways to reach Rostock are by the autobahn or through the railway station. This is the last stop before Rostock, so we get off.’
‘No call to be so bloody grumpy. I just asked.’
The train stopped.
She shrugged away from him, heaved the rucksack onto her shoulders and avoided his help. They went down the corridor, past the Scouts, quiet now and sleeping.
They walked out of the empty station and waited across the road at the deserted shelter for the bus to Rostock.
* * *
He had driven to a petrol station where there was a photocopier and reproduced the file, a dozen pages given him by Hoffmann, the reports of an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, codename Wilhelm, on the community in which he worked. In the payphone, he had called the directory for telephone numbers, and then the number of the TM, codename Wilhelm. He had pretended he was trying to reach another man with an offer for double-glazed windows, had checked the address, and apologized for the disturbance.
He drove into the small community, clear roads at that time in the night.
There was a storm out at sea, beyond the darkened peninsula, and the wind came in over the Salzhaff, the spray climbing over the piles of the piers where the trawlers were tied. The ifie would turn the mind of the man, would destroy the man who had been, many years before, an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. Where the man lived now, there would be a fine view of the shore and the sea.
He put the copied file in an envelope, gummed it tight, and the man’s name on it. There was no need to write a message. He walked from his car to the door of a small house and the box beside it for post and circulars. The man who lived, in retirement, in the small house close to the sea at Rerik had known the names of all the witnesses. The man would have friends, would be respected, would be destroyed if it were known that he had been listed as an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, if it were known that he had informed on those who befriended him and respected him.
Dieter Krause swung his car away from the sea and away from the beat of the surf on the shingle shore.
They walked out of the bus station.
There was a whiff of the sea scent in the air. He chose the side streets and the back streets, where the lights were sparse, where they could hug the shadows. She murmured her bloody song . . . The bloody song, played on the forces’ radio, was hers and her boy’s. He was not a part of the bloody song. It was all for love, her love and the boy’s love. He was not included in the love. .
* * *
The last train of the night reached Rostock.
The passengers spilled down onto the platform.
The two men waited at the top of the tunnel from the platform, scanned each half-asleep face, beaded their eyes on each young woman who scurried with her bags from the platform to the tunnel.
They waited for the platform to clear, threw down their cigarettes, and turned away.
It was an old house, three storeys high. The façades of the houses on either side had been pressure-cleaned, but the house with the pension
sign was grimed with old dirt. He waited at the door. She had dropped back. Through the glass he saw a man at the desk, reading, oil-slicked hair, wearing an overcoat, and behind the man was the row of keys hanging in front of the letter rack. She reached him.
‘Gold medal for picking luxury.’
‘There’s a Radisson in Rostock, and a Ramada, and there’s a new hotel at the railway station, and they are where they would expect us to go.’
‘Don’t be so bloody scratchy.’ She grinned.
He pushed open the glass door. The man looked up from the magazine. The reception desk was worn, unvarnished, and there was the smell of cabbage and boiled sausagemeat. The man shivered in his overcoat. Around the letter rack, where the keys were, the wallpaper was wrinkled, faded. The man greased them a smile.
It was obvious from the keys, hung unevenly from nails, but he asked if the man had accommodation available.
The man leered. ‘One room or two rooms?’
She laughed out loud behind him.
‘Two rooms,’ Josh said.
The man’s hand, the nicotine-stained fingers, flitted over the keys. He took two keys.
The man winked. ‘Two rooms — adjoining.’
She laughed again.
The man asked for documents. Josh took his wallet from his pocket and slid a banknote for a hundred DMs onto the palm of the man’s hand, which did not move. Another banknote. The hand slid with discretion towards the man’s hip pocket. He gave Josh the keys, pointed to the staircase, picked up his magazine again.
They climbed the stairs, up the threadbare carpet. The smell of cabbage and sausage was replaced by the must of stale damp. It was colder on the stairs than at the reception desk. They stood in the corridor on the second floor in the low light and he gave her the second key.
‘Is it off and running in the morning, Mr Mantle?’
‘We don’t run anywhere, at any time. We plan. We take it slowly. Step by step, so there are no surprises. I need to think it through.’
‘Goodnight, Mr Mantle.’
He needed to sleep and, in the morning, he needed to think... and in the morning he needed to tell her that he was Josh and not Mr Mantle. So damn tired...
‘Goodnight, Tracy.’
He had been the first to reach the café. Krause had taken a seat in an alcove where he could view the door. They drifted in from Augusten Strasse. He stood, correctly, for each of them, for the taxi driver who came with the building-site security guard, for the criminal, the property developer. The woman who now owned the café had once managed the canteen in the building on August-Bebel Strasse, she would once have run to take the orders of Hauptman Krause and Leutnant Hoffmann, even Siehi, Fischer and Peters. She had closed the café, kicked out her customers. She had put beer on the table and gone to her kitchen area.
Hoffmann said, ‘I can be away for two days. Too much work for me to be away longer.’
‘I am building a new life.’ Fischer shrugged. ‘In three years I hope to have my own taxi, but I have to work.’
Peters had a meeting in Warsaw the day after tomorrow.
Siehl whined that if he were not back by tomorrow night then he would lose his job, and did the Hauptman know how hard it was to find work in Berlin?
Krause wondered if they had walked past the old building before coming to the café and looked for the darkened windows above August-Bebel Strasse that had been theirs, remembering how they had walked with pride, anonymous, through the big door. He wondered if they had glanced down at the windows flush with the pavement behind which had been the interrogation rooms.
‘Can I tell you, my friends, the reality? You stay, we all stay, until the matter is completed, until the problem is finished with. We have one week. It is necessary for it to be finished in one week. If you do not stay, you will not be doing anything from a cell in the Moabit gaol. . . That, my friends, is reality.’
‘Because of one girl, height a metre sixty, weight sixty kilos. Not to forget the russet hair. It is just one girl. Easy to recognize her. Ask her to hold up her hands, look at her fingernails, scrape under fingernails for the skin of Hauptman Krause.’ Peters led their laughter.
‘It is amusing? It is the big joke? It is funny? We are together, as at Rerik we were together.’
Hoffmann hesitated. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
Siehl flushed. ‘You killed him and we only obeyed your orders.’
‘So, let me tell you more of reality. The kid, the spy, was chased. Who chased him? He was caught, felled. Who caught him? On the ground, he was kicked. Who kicked him? He was kept still on the ground by a boot across his throat. Who wore the boot? He was taken back to the boat. Who dragged him? He was weighted, he was put into the water. Who lifted him over the side of the boat? More of reality, it would be a common charge. It would be an accusation of conspiracy to murder. We were together at Rerik. If we fail we will be together in the gaol at Moabit. Do you now believe?’
Fischer said, loyal, ‘We did our duty. Again we will do our duty, whatever is necessary.’
He told them where they should watch in the city, what times and at what places, and repeated his description of the young woman. He took the Makharov pistols from his attaché case, each still wrapped in the plastic bags, and passed them over the table, with ammunition and magazines. He handed them the mobile telephones he had hired in the afternoon and had them each write down the numbers. He passed a file to each of them — Jorg Brandt’s to Hoffmann, Heinz Gerber’s to Siehl, Artur Schwarz’s to Fischer, and Willi Muller’s he slipped between the beer glasses to Peters. For each of them there was a responsibffity. He laid his hand, palm down, on the table. Hoffmann’s covered his. Siehl’s covered Hoffmann’s. Fischer’s covered Siehl’s. Peters’ covered Fischer’s. He felt the weight of their hands on his.
They went their ways.
He walked in the shadowed streets towards his car.
He could see the body of the boy, moving in currents of water, held by the weighted pots, flowing against the sand bottom of the Salzhaff. There were crabs crawling at the eyes of the boy, and molluscs fastened to his lips. Eels writhed on the legs and arms. For six nights now he had seen the body and heard the laughter of the boy, mocking and taunting.
He ran, as if when in his car he would no longer see the boy.
Josh slept. A ragged, tossing, restless sleep. He was too tired to dream.
Chapter Nine
The banging split his mind. He hadn’t dreamed. He was dead to the world. He jerked, like a convulsion. The sheet and the two blankets came off his body, along with the coat that had been on top of them. The banging belted at the door.
‘Are you in there, or aren’t you?’
He yawned, gulped. The cold of the room came around him. Bright, brittle sunlight streamed through the thin material of the curtains. He shivered. There was no heating in the room. He blinked, tried to focus his eyes, looked at his watch.
‘If you’re there, then bloody well say so.’
It was past ten o’clock. God, he’d slept nine hours, dead, without a dream. He had been able to do without sleep in Ashford or Osnabruck, when he’d worked the night shifts merging into the day shifts at the Mansoura prison in Aden . . . but Josh Mantle was fifty-four years old and he had missed a whole night’s sleep on the step beside the door at Saarbrucker Strasse. He checked that he was decent, that he wasn’t hanging out of his pyjama trousers, had his coat wrapped tight around him. He turned the key.
She stood in the corridor. She looked at him, made him feel so feeble. She looked from his unshaven face to his coat tight around him, to his waist, to the pyjamas and down to his bare feet.
She grimaced. ‘Christ, that’s a pretty sight.’
‘I’m sorry, I overslept.’
‘Old for it, are you? Need your sleep, do you?’
He bit his lip. ‘I apologize. I’ve slept three hours longer than I intended.’
‘I’ve been sitting in that damp, grotty, freezing bloody r
oom and waiting. What you’ve done, sir,’ she sneered on the word, ‘is bugger up the day, don’t you know.’
‘I said that I was sorry.’ She was dressed in her heavy walking shoes and jeans, the thick sweater and the new anorak. He stood aside so that she could come into the room. He went, dazed, across the room and moved his clothes from the one wooden chair. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I hadn’t intended that we’d do much.’
‘That’s good, “intended”. That’s bloody rich. “I hadn’t intended” — great, terrific!’ She had mimicked his words in a west London whine, the drawl of an officer thrown in. ‘You’re taking a bloody liberty.’
‘What I was trying to say . . .‘ He stood in the centre of the room, clothes of two days’ wear in hand. ‘I was trying to say that I hadn’t intended we’d do much today — get everything in place, think through...’
Her face lit, mock amazement, savage. ‘You have a misapprehension, sir. Do you think I came out here, one hope in my mind, that Mr Mantle would come running after me? Mr Mantle, bloody white armour, shining, and necessary to me? Can’t do it without Mr bloody Mantle, after he’s had his sleep.’
He said, ‘It’s right to plan, take time over it, plan routes and schedules. You work it out, don’t just pitch in, you weigh the options. We plan today, work it through, we go to Rerik tomorrow. Have to have decent maps, have to know what we’re doing.’
‘I’m going out.’
‘That’s not clever.’ Trying to be reasonable and patient.
‘Then I’m not clever, but I’m going out.’
The Waiting Time Page 18