The Waiting Time

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Where? Where are you going?’

  ‘Where I’m not suffocated by you. Where you’re not breathing down my bloody neck.’

  ‘You want to be stupid and unprofessional, see if I care.’

  The sneers had gone, the taunts were wiped away. She said, ‘We were in Rostock a few hours before we went to Rerik, before it was dark and he took the boat, before Hans went. . . We went from here up the river to Warnemunde, and we walked on the beach there and on the breakwater. Do you know about being in love, Mr Mantle?’

  ‘Not a lot.’ His temper had melted. She was the child, the innocent.

  ‘I want to go on the beach, on the breakwater, where we were. I want to be alone, just with him. I want to be with him, alone with him. . . I had to drive, after we’d been on the beach and the breakwater, to Rerik because he was too screwed down tight, clawed up, to drive himself. He was dead a few hours after we’d walked on the beach and the breakwater.’

  She told him where she would be, and he would get a map after she’d gone and find the place. She had sledgehammered at him, the emotions rioted in him. He wished he could take her in his arms, comfort her, hold her, but he was fifty-four years old and knew so little about love.

  ‘Just give me two or three hours . . . It’s where we were .

  Come and get me. We’ll talk it through, your plan. We’ll have a bloody great meal, and double chips, and a bloody great big bottle. I have to be with him.’

  He said gruffly, choked on it, ‘Fine, that’ll be fine. And go carefully.’

  She smiled, sadness and youth, a love that he was not a part

  of. He heard her go away down the corridor and listened for her singing until he could hear her no longer. He stripped and washed in ice-cold water. The sunlight had gone from the window, the clouds massed low above the roof tops. The room was greyer without the sunlight, without her.

  He had made good time. He had left Savignyplatz too early to disturb Rogers: he had paid his bill and slipped away.

  He rather enjoyed the quiet of the car, the radio turned low.

  As he drove towards the outskirts of the city, ignoring the Dummerstorf-Waldeck turning, he considered the priorities of his day. First priority, a good hotel, if that were possible in Rostock. Second priority, to telephone Helen. Couldn’t remember, not to save his life, whether this was a day on which she had morning, afternoon or evening classes. He tried to call most days when he was abroad. Third priority, to telephone Basil. He called Basil his best friend, and Helen called him his only friend. He sat next to Basil in the Riverside Stand, season-ticket holders. He would not be back for Fullham against Bristol City, division two. He disliked the thought of Basil sitting next to an empty place and, if he was away over a home game, always rang him at the car-repair yard to suggest that Basil should call by at Hampton Wick and collect his ticket and take someone else. The fourth priority, to telephone Mr Fleming, just a progress report. Fifth priority, to search out the man who could tell a story, guaranteed to amuse, about the wife

  It was important to Albert Perkins to have a day ahead of him filled with priorities. He braked hard, swerved for the slow lane at the sign for Rostock Sud. He saw the parked car. With a slight gesture, insufficient to arouse attention, he raised his hand so that it would block a view of his face. He noted the man with the trimmed beard and the scars.

  He had heard, walking on empty streets away from Savignyplatz, in his imagination, the night before, the howl of a wolf. He smiled, satisfied, because his prediction had been proved correct. The pack had gathered. He drove towards the towering spires of the old churches, and the old walls of the city. The car at the slip-road, watching the traffic off the Autobahn from Berlin, told him that they had slipped through in the late evening. The young woman, if she listened to Mantle, stood a chance of achieving the policy objective, if she listened .

  He headed past the Rathaus, onto Lange Strasse, towards the heart of Rostock.

  He was not certain.

  The former Feldwebel, the taxi driver, eased the vehicle into gear. The hair was correct, but there were many with hair that colour in the city. He thought the height was near to correct, but it was an average height for a young woman. He had been told that the target woman was of slight build, but she wore a heavy sweater, he could see the neck of it and a quilted anorak, and he did not know whether she was slight or heavy.

  He passed her, idling in the road, drove by her and then stopped so that he could see her in his mirror. In former times, when Ulf Fischer had served as a Feidwebel at the headquarters on August-Bebel Strasse he had not been required to make a decision, to act on initiative. As a taxi driver he did not make decisions, went where he was told to go. The Hauptman would be on the far side of the city, on the slip-road. He was nervous of alerting the Hauptmnn and being wrong. He rang Hoffmann on the mobile phone.

  She came past him, but her head was turned away. He thought she walked towards the Hauptbahnhof.

  The second secretary (consular), each week and alternating between their Moscow embassy offices, met the cultural attaché for lunch. It was a source of some small annoyance to the London man from the Service that the Washington man from the Agency had the resources to serve up the better meal.

  ‘This Krause guy, the one your lady soldier rolled over, they’ve gotten into heavy excitement about him back home.’

  ‘Soon be there, the warrior wearing his wounds.’

  ‘They’ve moved the auditorium for him, at the Pentagon. He’s going where they can fit another fifty seats.’

  The annoyance, to the Briton, was that the American was provided with quality equipment for his kitchenette — gas rings, a microwave and a fridge-freezer large enough to store half an ox, a coffee-bean grinder and a percolator. The room at the American embassy where they lunched was metal-walled, sheet steel plate on the windows, secure against electronic audio surveillance.

  ‘The man of the moment, the good Colonel Rykov. . . I can tell you, Brad, there’s a monumental inquest back home. Heads will roll for what happened to Krause. Is it right that the Germans are going over the pond mob-handed? It’s what I heard.’

  ‘Chipping away at the cement of the special relationship, David. What I hear, at Langley there’s a powerful number enrolling for German classes — hey, David, that’s intended as a joke. These days, for all the kids, the clerks, who go jogging in the lunch hour, Elgar is strictly dated, they’ve all put Beethoven tapes in their Walkpersons. OK, so that’s not funny, but can I hint to you, prickly Brit, that the special relationship still lives?’

  ‘I feed from the floor under your table.’

  It was usual for them to share at their weekly lunches. Half an hour later, the Briton was on his way back to his embassy and formulating in his mind the text of the message that would go in cypher to Vauxhall Bridge Cross. Colonel Rykov, through his minister, had kicked with accuracy the testicles of the ‘reconstructed’ KGB, which was a dangerous old game, a game where the kicker might incur a serious hurt. It would go as a priority signal.

  ‘I think you did well, Fischer.’

  ‘I was not certain. I didn’t wish to waste the time of the Han ptrnan.’

  They stood beside a café, closed for the winter. The sun had gone. The sleet came in the wind from the low cloud merged with the sea and whipped the beach. Hoffmann held his hand flat above his eyes to keep it from his face, to see better. She was a small grey figure holding bright flowers and she sat on the dull sand near the water line.

  ‘I think the Han ptman will be pleased with you, Fischer.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Ulf Fischer flushed with pride. She sat alone on the beach. Hoffmann made the call to Krause on the slip-road. Hoffmann had met him at the Hauptbahnhof, they had tried to track the train on the S-Bahn line north from the city to Warnemunde, had been held at red traffic lights behind a police van. They had seen her, for a few seconds, at a distance, near to the Hotel Neptun, had lost her because they could not park the car, found her a
gain. The flowers moved, bobbed, carried by the faint figure as she pushed herself up from the dull sand. She was against the sea and the cloud and the sleet. She walked slowly on the beach, meandered, towards them, towards the breakwater over which the waves burst.

  He used to tell his wife, when he came home in the evening from August-Bebel Strasse, each time that the Hauptman praised him.

  He had the route, not the direct way, down the E22, the main road, through Bad Doberan and Kropelin. On the map he had marked the minor roads through the villages skirting the two towns and then coming to Rerik from the south, using Neubukow as the crossing point over the E22. Slower roads and a greater distance, but safe. Painstakingly, using a sliver of rolled paper, he measured the distance on the minor roads, so that he would know how long the journey would take. It had to be thought through. It was important to know the detail. He had telephoned for a hire car, using the trade directory, not a company from the centre but a small business in the Sudstadt, and he would pay extra and the car would be delivered to the pension.

  When he was finished, Josh folded away the map and went methodically through his room, through the pockets of his clothes, through his bag. He left nothing that identified him. With his nail scissors from the wash-bag he cut out the label tabs in English on every item that would be left in the room. He satisfied himself. When he brought her back he would do the same in her room, bully her into allowing him to destroy her identity. His telephone rang, his hire car was downstairs. He checked the money in his wallet. It was later than he had hoped to be. She would have longer to walk on her beach and her breakwater.

  The breakwater ran two hundred metres into the sea.

  The base of it was huge quarried rocks, some as big as a saloon car, cut rough and jagged edged. To the west was the sand beach, scattered with debris seaweed, ice and snow packed solid at the tideline. To the east was the channel for the fishing boats of Warnemunde, and the river passage running the few kilometres to Rostock and the shipyards.

  More snow, more ice had gathered in the rocks of the breakwater. It would melt in the next month, but the bitter Baltic wind and the harsh frost nights would keep it in place for the next few weeks.

  There was a concrete walkway on top of the rocks and a single strand of metal tubing made a barrier to save the unwary from being blown by the gale, or slipping on the ice, and falling onto the rocks, onto the snow and ice, into the pounding sea that smashed on the breakwater.

  At the end was a squat lighthouse, paint peeled by the force of the winter’s sea spray, daubed with the names of the summer’s tourists. There was no fence around the base of the lighthouse, only a low wall less than half a metre in height. Below it the rocks fell sheer to the foaming motion of the water.

  The sleet in the wind had driven visitors from the breakwater. Years ago, before the day of ‘reassociation’, before the day that the crowd had pushed and elbowed their way into the headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst on August-Bebel Strasse, there had always been people standing on the breakwater, whatever the weather, huddled close to the curved wall of the lighthouse, to watch the big ferries sail for Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and to dream.

  The low cloud, carrying the stinging sleet, made a short, grey horizon.

  The breakwater and the base of the lighthouse were deserted, empty, but for one small splash of colour.

  They stood at the south end of the breakwater, bent forward against the wind. They narrowed their eyes against the driven sleet.

  Fischer said, ‘We should wait for him, we should not take action until he is here.’

  Peters jabbed a finger into the taxi driver’s arm. ‘We don’t wait for Krause — you guarantee me a better place and a better time, do you? Can you?’

  The year after the anti-Fascist barrier had come down, in the Sicilian town of Agrigento, Gunther Peters had been given advice by an old man with a weathered walnut face. Never, in a matter of importance, hesitate in the taking of action. He had accepted the advice, and the proof was in his wealth held in numbered accounts in Lichtenstein and in the British-administered Channel Islands, in Gibraltar, in the investment companies based on the Caymans, and none of that wealth was flaunted. He moved money for the Sicilians. He moved cars, stolen in Germany, for the Russians and the Ukrainians. He moved weapons, bought at a knock-down price in Russia, for the Chechens, the Kurds and the Palestinians. He forswore a top-of-the-range car, gold necklaces and gold bracelets, a penthouse apartment in one of the new blocks in Leipzig, following more of the advice of the man from Agrigento. It was his belief that he figured on no police computer. On the night of 21 November 1988, clearing his desk, about to go to his home, Hauptman Krause had seen him. Krause, running, had seen him, shouted, given the order. He had been in the car before he had even known the cause of the emergency. It was he who had first caught up with the kid, the spy, grabbed him and flung him down to the ground and held him in the moment after the kid, the spy, had lashed with a boot into the balls of the Hauptman. He had his freedom to lose, and his anonymity, and the wealth that he did not use, and his power.

  Two hundred metres from them, away up the length of the deserted breakwater, was the young woman.

  Peters jabbed again with his finger. ‘You are chicken shit. I do it myself.’

  He went forward. Hoffmann ran, bent against the wind, to be alongside Peters. The young woman sat on the low wall at the base of the lighthouse and her legs were above the foam of the sea. Siehl, his hand protecting his face from the sleet, hurried to catch them. The young woman threw, one at a time, the bright flowers into the rising, falling, pounding spray below her feet. Fischer looked a last time behind him, as if hoping to see the Hauptman, and scurried to reach them. The young woman, above the rocks, above the sea, gazed down and did not look up.

  They made a line and walked with purpose towards the lighthouse, and the spray rose around them from the rocks and the ice.

  He came to the start of the breakwater. He peered the length of it, searched for her.

  He had driven from Rostock, a fast four-lane road, bypassed the housing blocks on flat, windscaped ground, and the shipyards with the idle cranes.

  He had checked the beach, looked as far as he could see, and the sleet in the wind had dampened his trousers and soaked his shoes.

  He blinked. She was a small, blurred figure. He saw her and the colour of her flowers. She would be wet through because she was a lunatic to have gone in that weather to the end of the breakwater. He was old enough to be her father, feeling the responsibility of a parent for a child. He began to walk briskly, into the sleet wind, along the breakwater. Half-way, the spray wall climbed and fell, and he was aware of the men.

  Josh saw four men.

  They made a line across the width of the breakwater’s pathway. They were in front of him, and he had not noticed them, only her. It was where she had been with the boy, giving her love, frightened, kissing the boy and holding him. He saw them, the two of them, loving and kissing and holding. He seemed to see the boy, clear images, rattling through as if shown on a fast- changing projector, swimming and bleeding and staying afloat, sinking and rising again, and hands reaching for him from over the side of a small trawler.

  Four men moving forward, striding in step. It was a cordon line. There could be only one purpose for it. Either side of them was deep water, and rocks and ice with snow. Holy Christ.. . His old, slow, numbed mind churned. So bloody obvious. He started to run.

  She did not seem to see them. She was looking down into the breaking waves at her flowers.

  He ran, and the wind caught him. The sleet cut at his face and blinded him, the spray fell on him and drenched him. He slipped as he ran, legs splayed by an iced footfall, and he fell, his trouser knee ripped. He pushed himself up and ran again.

  They were across the breakwater’s pathway and closing on her. He could not have shouted to her, not while he ran and sucked for breath. He saw the sea, rising and falling and hostile, and the rocks, hard an
d jagged and cruel. The four men would have turned if they had heard him, but he came into the wind and the sleet and the crash sound of the sea on the rocks.

  Josh ran. As he ran he ripped down the zipper of his coat, which billowed out, a sail against the wind and the sleet, slowed him. He sobbed for breath. He reached with cold dead fingers inside his jacket, to the inner pocket. It was the only fucking answer in his head. He was near to them and they were unaware of him.

  He dragged the gold-plate fountain pen from the inner pocket, the pen that Libby had given him, their last Christmas, held it in his fist. He could see the backs of their necks.

  She looked down at the sea. There was one flower left in her hand and she threw it to a wave crest.

  He came behind them. He chose the one with the black hair falling on the collar of his coat, the one with the longest hair. He grabbed it. He rammed the metal, gold-plated end of the pen against the nape of the man’s neck, pulled him back, in one movement. The line broke, they were turning on him, swinging to him. He was behind the man. They could not see the end of the pen, cold metal, against the man’s neck.

  Josh shouted, good German, ‘Get back or I shoot. I shoot to kill.’ He felt the tremble-shiver of the man’s fear. The three faced him. He must dominate and fast. He must use the shock of the three and the fear of the one.

  He hissed, ‘Tell them, bastard, they back off or I shoot. Tell them.’

  She was forty paces from him. She stared at him, at the men. He yelled against the wind, fought for breath for his voice: ‘Tracy, come to me. Come on.’

  The man croaked, pleaded, to the three.

  ‘I shoot, bastard, I shoot through your fucking spine.’

  One, the youngest, with a cold face, thin lips, took a half pace forward. The man Josh held shook and cried, and the two older men grabbed the youngest, held each of his arms.

  Josh shouted at the wind, at the spray, at the sleet, at the cloud where it merged with the wave caps behind her: ‘Come to me, Tracy. Move!’

  God, and she was so bloody slow, pushing herself up as if she did not understand.