‘They change nothing but the name. It is a new name but the old way. When the KGB wishes to intimidate then it drives close. It lets you see them, lets the anxiety build, lets you know they are close and merely await the final order.’
‘You have no doubt?’
‘They want to be seen.’
He reached between his legs and pressed the combination numbers of his briefcase lock. He took his service pistol from the briefcase and checked the magazine and the safety. He slid it into his waist, cold metal against his skin.
‘Stop.’
His driver braked. The black car with the three men inside stopped a dozen paces behind them.
‘Pull away.’
They eased away from the curb. The black car with the three men inside followed behind them.
‘What do I do, friend?’
‘It is what you have already done. You have bred enemies.’
The fear winnowed in Pyotr Rykov’s mind. It was the fear he had known when he had walked in the villages of Afghanistan, when he had been in the street markets and bazaars of Jalalabad and Herat, when the threat was always behind him.
‘I am protected.’
The driver smiled mirthlessly. ‘In Russia, through this century, Colonel, men have believed they were protected.’
‘I am protected by the minister.’
‘The minister is not in the Kremlin, Colonel. They are in the Kremlin.’
‘They can flick themselves.’
‘It is a warning. They will watch to see how you respond to the warning.’
They reached the apartment. The apartment was in an old building in a wide street. He stood for a moment on the pavement and the black car accelerated away. None of the three men looked as they passed. He told his driver at what time he should be collected after lunch. He was alone, and exposed.
‘I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Phlegm — diffidence sits uneasily with you.’
They lunched in the judge’s chambers. A manservant waited at the table. No guests, only the judge and Fleming of German Desk.
‘It’s not a state of affairs I enjoy, Beakie.’
‘Do I have to spread the towel on my shoulder again, or is it time for confidences? Is it about that business, the young woman and the Stasi thug?’
In the good old days, the lamented old days that were gone, there would have been brandy with the coffee. Not any more. Fleming refilled his glass of gassed water.
‘How long have you got?’
‘Not more than ten minutes. Bounce it at me.’
Fleming said, ‘It is extraordinary, certainly beyond my experience. We are not in control, but we have what we regard as important policy riding on it — yet, we are reduced to watching. Our allies, the Germans, equally have policy at stake and they, too, are not in control. Our two policies are set against each other. We’re like two commanders, each on our respective high ground, looking down into a valley. That valley, into which we respectively look, was once a super-power confrontation zone — not any more. The valley, the battlefield of our policies that conflict, is the city of Rostock and the small communities around Rostock. It’s a minor provincial city, stultifyingly dull. In that valley are our respective shock troops — don’t laugh — engaged in combat to the death. On their side is Hauptman Krause, and any allies he can muster. On our side is an abject failure of a man and a junior NCO, a young woman. Either of us, on the high ground above the valley, can lose the policy we seek to achieve but neither of us can intervene. It is as if the valley were covered by the fog of war. I’ve never felt so helpless about something that matters to me. I assume my opposite number in Cologne feels precisely the same way. We must wait for that fog to clear to see who holds the valley, who are the casualties. Good to get it off my chest, Beakie, thank you. It’s a unique experience for me to feel so helpless. You’d better get back to that bloody court-room.’
Chapter Twelve
……Because he was a coward..
He walked on. Josh Mantle had never in his life hit a woman. He walked fast, tried to leave her behind him. He wished he had hit her. If he had turned to look behind him then he would no longer have seen the low buildings of Warnemunde and the breakwater going out into the water and the squat lighthouse.
‘Josh, you are being ridiculous. It wasn’t your fault. He couldn’t face it, he was a coward. .
There were low scrub trees at the top of the beach beyond the bent grass of the dunes. He walked beside the last strips of the winter’s grey-brown ice and close to the grey-green sea that came white-flecked to the ice line. His head was down, his chin was on his chest. Sometimes he closed his eyes, squeezed them shut, but he could not lose the image of the man, or escape the terror of Jorg Brandt.
‘Josh, will you stop, will you listen. . . You don’t blame yourself, you blame him. He was a coward.’
He saw only the terror of the man, not that last moment of peace on his features.
But for the hectoring voice behind him, Josh was alone.
He sought a solitude. He was, had always been, his own man. He had been his own man when they had brought him home from the school in Penang to the stinking heat, wet, insect-ridden home, and his father had sat with the whisky bottle and told him that the ‘fucking slit-eyes’ had shot his mother, and had then left him alone and gone with the rest of them to wreck the Chinese quarter. His own man at barracks schools, and at the Apprentice College, alone on the train with the small suitcase, alone in the classrooms and in the dormitory. He had been, for ever, alone. He had been his own man, alone, in the I Corps postings...
Except the once when he had followed his captain and the Guatemalan had died, and he had compromised.
and in the Special Investigation Branch, alone in the mess at Tidworth when he had demanded that a thief be prosecuted and branded; alone in the bar of the mess half an hour after the call for free drinks to see him on his way, after the second in command had made the speech, perfunctorily, and dumped the cheap carriage clock on his lap. His own man on the streets, alone...
Except for the meeting with Libby and marrying Libby, and better that he had been his own man, alone, because she was taken from him and the pain of it was his cross.
Each crisis that came to Josh Mantle’s life battered a message to him: better to be his own man, better to be alone.
‘Are you going to stop? I can’t help it if he was a bloody coward.’
He pounded the beach, empty ahead of him, because he yearned to be alone. If he had been alone, if she had not been behind him, if there had been no witness, if there had been only the company of the sand and the sea and the grey black clouds and the wind, then he would have gone down on to his knees. He would have talked to his Libby, would have told her everything...
‘Look at me. Bloody well look.’
He stopped.
‘Come on, look at me.’
He did not kneel.
‘Do it, Josh, turn round. Look.’
He did not know how he should escape from her. He had walked an hour and a half on the beach, round headlands, and she tracked him. He could not escape from her. As if she held him, Josh turned.
Her coat was furthest back, discarded by the ice line, a speck. He saw her sweater, left on the sand and lying across the track of their footprints. Her blouse and her bra were caught by the wind and rolled towards the grass of the dunes. Her shoes were behind her, abandoned, and her socks.
She hopped on one foot, she kicked off her jeans. He had turned as she had known he would. She threw her jeans away from her, over the bare white skin of her shoulder. She wore only her knickers. Her legs were a little apart and she stood defiant with her fingers at her hips, resting on the waistband of her knickers. She challenged him. She would strip to nothing if he did not come to her, as she ordered him to. He could not turn away. The gale came off the sea and ruffled the clothes scattered behind her and caught her hair and beat at her nakedness. He wore, against his chest, a vest and a shirt and a pu
llover and a jacket and his outer coat, and Josh still shivered. She did not flinch in the cold of the wind.
‘Come. . . Come here, Josh.’
He started to walk towards her. She stood on the beach, so still. His eyes never left her. His eyes searched across the nakedness of her body. He unzipped the fastener of his coat, peeled it from his chest and shoulders. He saw each line on her skin, each spot and blemish and mole. She held out her arms. He saw the straggling hair in the pits of her arms. He slotted the sleeves of his coat over her arms and he stood in front of her and fastened the zip, and then he buttoned the coat over the zip. He retraced their foot- marks in the sand, picked up her trousers, then hei shoes and her socks. He shook the sand from her bra and her blouse, from her sweater and her coat.
He dropped the clothes at her feet. ‘Get dressed.’
‘I’ll get dressed when you’ve spat it out of your system, Josh.’
He looked into her face. He wanted to hold her and warm her. There was no scorn in her face, only the innocence.
‘You never, ever again call a man a coward. You call a man a coward and you strip him bare. To call a man a coward is to make a judgement on him. It is the worst of arrogance to believe yourself qualified to call a man a coward. He would have been soaked from the sea, bloodstained, he would have been in shadow, incoherent, but you say that the man who slammed the door on him was a coward. Your Hans was a goddamn problem. We all do it, every day, I do it, you, everybody, we cross over the street to avoid a problem. Jorg Brandt suffered, he didn’t have the memories of love that you had, but you call him a coward.’
‘Should have stayed at home, should I?’
‘Just get dressed.’
‘Don’t fucking lecture me.’
‘I walked away from you because otherwise I would have hit you.’
She tore his coat off. She crouched over her own clothes. ‘Your wife, when she left you, did you hit her?’
He rocked.
‘When she left you, did you lecture her?’
He clasped his hands together so they should not be free to strike her.
Josh said, ‘I’ll see you at the car. You should get dressed.’ He went back, away, along the beach.
Albert Perkins walked on Kropeliner Strasse in search of a former Oberstleutnant. He was inside the old city walls. The street was a pedestrian precinct, at the core of Rostock. There was, he thought, an air of prosperity about Kropeliner Strasse, new paint, new shopfronts, new pavings, but he knew the prosperity was a mirage because the interiors of the shops were empty. Women queued to be served at the fruit and vegetable stalls and kids lounged by the fast food outlets, but the boutiques and the hardware stores and the interior furnishing businesses were empty. There were people at the well stocked window of the camera shop, but inside the shop was empty. He looked through the window, past the shelves of cameras and lenses and tripods and binoculars and bags, and he saw a middle-aged man and a girl who sat languid and under-employed.
He pushed open the door.
The smile of welcome lit the man’s face. He was a customer, an event. The girl straightened. Albert Perkins wandered to the far end of the shop and the man, predictable, followed him. He had led the man out of earshot from the girl. There were times when Albert Perkins lied with the best of them, and times when he discarded untruths for frankness.
‘Good afternoon. I am a busy man, and I am sure you would like to be a busy man. . . You were the Oberstleutnant heading the Abteilung responsible for covert surveillance filming. I come as a trader. If you have what I want then I will pay for it. Life, as I always say, is a market-place. You don’t need my name, nor do you need to know the organization that I represent, and if the merchandise is satisfactory then I pay for discretion. There was a Hauptman Krause at August-Bebel Strasse. The wife of Hauptman Krause was Eva, and the lovely Eva enjoyed the favours of a Soviet officer, a Major Rykov. An Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, overwhelmed by his ideological duty, reported these sessions in the art of copulation to a handler. The bed play was filmed. Now, if I am not to be disappointed and you are to be paid, those ifims will have been preserved. I wish to buy the films of Eva Krause coupling with Major Rykov.’
The man, the former Oberstleutnant, chuckled. The mirth ripped his face. ‘People want only, today, what is new. I could fill my shelves with cameras, lenses, produced in the old DDR, and people will walk past them. They demand only what is new, which they cannot afford to pay for.’
‘No money orders, no travellers’ cheques, banknotes in the hand — if you have the film I want to buy.’
The man waved to the girl, she should mind the shop. She was unlikely to be trampled by a stampede. He had keys on a chain and he walked through to where the stock was piled in boxes. Albert Perkins was pleased to see the quantity of the boxes, unpacked, as he had been pleased to see the quantity of cameras and lenses on the shelves. He thought the account books would make stark reading. The man unlocked a steel-plated door at the back of the shop. He led Albert Perkins down gloomy old stone steps.
The cellar was a small shrine dedicated to the past. The present and the future were at street level, where the Japanese cameras and lenses were displayed, and kept out by two sets of double- locked doors and a poorly lit stone staircase. Heavy timbers had been brought in, old wood, and were used as props between the floor and the ceiling, and Albert Perkins thought the cellar must have once been a shelter against the bombing. There was a good armchair on a square of good carpet. The man gestured that he should sit. In front of the chair was a television set, large screen, and under the television was a video player. He sat. The man ignored a shelf of video-cassettes and knelt in front of a wall safe and used his body to prevent Perkins seeing the combination he used. The exhibits, for the shrine, were on a shelf behind the television, and each was labelled as if the pride still lived.
There was a camera the size of a matchbox, what the ‘grey mouse’ would have used for the photography of documents; an attaché case, and it took the trained eye of Albert Perkins to see the pinhead hole in the end of it; a cooler bag, and he saw the brightness of the lens set where a stud should have been for the holding strap, good for the beach in summer; tape recorders for audio surveillance; button-sized microphones for a man to wear on his chest; long directional microphones for distance; a length of log, the bark peeling from dried-out age, and he frowned because he could not see the lens; electric wall fittings and plugs for hotel rooms, in which a microphone or a camera could be hidden. . . The safe door was shut. The man had lifted out three video-cassettes.
He said, briskly, ‘Could you, please, my friend, stand up.’
Albert Perkins stood. The man came behind him and quickly, with expertise, frisked him. The man tapped with the palms of his hands at the collar and the chest and the upper arms and the waist and in his groin and at his ankles. Albert Perkins had never carried a firearm. Firearms were for the cowboys in Ireland. It was a good search, professional.
The man said, ‘Please, sit down.’
A video was placed in the cassette player. The television was switched on.
Monochrome . . . A cramped, tight bedroom, filled with the width of the bed, and the angle wide enough to show the wallpaper above the bed. She was a good-looking woman. Agony and ecstasy on her face. She had a strong body.
Perkins watched. The warmth came through him.
‘Fifty thousand DMs...’
‘Fifteen thousand.’
She was on her back. Sharp focus. He was on her. Her knees high and tight against his hips. His hands on her shoulders and his back arched.
‘Forty-five thousand DMs.’
‘Twenty, top.’
She squirmed under him, she lifted her ankles and closed them round him. It wasn’t the sex that he knew, what Helen allowed on his birthday or her birthday, or on their anniversary, or when, rarely, she had drunk too much. She rolled him. ‘Forty thousand DMs, that is final.’
‘Twenty-five thousand is where I fi
nish.’
He saw Rykov’s face. His mouth was open, as if he gasped. He was on his back. She rode him, bucked on him as if he were a steer and her breasts bounced and she seemed to cry her rioting pleasure to the ceiling.
‘Thirty-five thousand DMs, and that is my absolutely final—’
‘I said twenty-five thousand was where I finished.’
‘You have seen five minutes, it is a three-hour tape, and there are two more tapes. .
‘Twenty-five thousand, cash.’
His eyes never left the screen. He wondered whether the old bastard had stayed home on the day the Oberstleutnant had come to instal the camera, or whether he had merely left the keys under the mat. She sat across him and she stroked the hairs of his stomach and his chest and he cupped her breasts. There wasn’t shyness between them, and the old bastard had said it wasn’t love.
‘Thirty thousand DMs, that is quite absolutely the final—’
‘Twenty-five thousand — be a shame to go to insolvency when you’ve worked so hard to build your business.’
She was off him. He was limp. She wiped a tissue between her legs. They didn’t kiss. They dressed fast, as if he had to get back to commanding a missile and radar unit and she was headed for her office or for a meeting or for collecting the child from the minder. The room was empty and the film ended. ‘Twenty-five thousand DMs, cash.’
‘Twenty-five thousand, cash, for three tapes, agreed.’
Albert Perkins stood in the street. Behind him the man pulled down the shutters, obscured the window of unsold Japanese cameras.
The cold of the evening settled on him after the heat and warmth of the cellar. It was always a mistake for a man to insert himself into forbidden territory, he reflected, but Albert Perkins never ceased to be amazed at how many men jeopardized their future in sweaty copulation.
He murmured, ‘Might have been good at the time, Colonel Rykov, might have been brilliant, but did you ever consider that you might live to regret it. Did you?’
The Waiting Time Page 25