He heard her go back to her room.
He had watched Christina’s victory. He had kissed her, had congratulated her, had left Eva to take her home.
Dieter Krause was not more than five minutes late at the meeting in the café on Augusten Strasse. Siehl was there, and Fischer, and Peters. They smoked and drank beer. They had all heard on the radio that a man had fallen to his death in Lichtenhagen. He had tried, himself, a dozen times to ring the mobile telephone of the former Leutnant.
He sat with his back to the door, and had not heard the door. He turned because of the smell. It was a moment, in the half-lit corner of the café, before he recognized Hoffmann.
Klaus Hoffmann’s hair was messed across his forehead. His eyes were reddened, those of a man who has wept without control. The vomit stains were on his jacket and across the thighs of his trousers.
‘You smell like a fucking pigsty,’ Peters said.
‘Where have you been, Klaus?’ he asked. There was, in that second of time, a hesitation in Dieter Krause.
Hoffmann said, a distant voice. ‘I walked. You see, friends, I saw him fall. It was not I that pushed him. I spoke to him, a few words, as he went into the block. I knew it was him because his name was called from the apartment, there were people to see him. He broke away from me and took the elevator. I saw him on the roof. . . I have to go home because people have come from the West and attempt to claim our house. . . The man who threw me onto the rocks from the breakwater, he tried to reach Brandt on the roof. They have come from the West and have an order from the court for the restitution of the property that their grandfather abandoned in 1945. When I spoke to him at the door of the block he had such terror. I told him that we watched him. I made the terror real for him. I did not know we could make such fear, still. . . They have come to take my house and I am going, now, home to Berlin...’
Dieter Krause said, chill, ‘You walk away from us, Klaus, and you are walking to the Moabit gaol.’
Klaus Hoffmann’s manic laugh rang through the room. ‘Still, the threats, as if you believe that nothing has changed. Too much has changed. I walked and wept and was sick because I realized what had changed.. . Then, I had an order. Then, I could hide myself behind the instruction of my Hauptman. Then, I could say I was doing my duty as told me by my superior. . . Now, I have no order and no instruction and no duty, and I am going to my home in Berlin.’
He turned on his heel. He took his smell into the street. He left them, stunned and silent, behind him.
Only when the black shadows came to the streets had Josh left his room to get fast food for the two of them.
He had taken the food and his bedding to her room.
They had not spoken as they had eaten, nor as he had made his bed up.
He lay on his back in the darkness and stared towards the ceiling he could not see.
‘For God’s sake, Josh . . .‘ The night sounds of the city murmured through the window, through the curtains. He lay on his back with his head in his locked hands.
‘For Christ’s sake, Josh — so, the man fell. .
He watched the man go over the edge of the roof.
‘So, you wouldn’t talk to me and walk with me, and I made you by stripping...’
He watched her body hit by the wind on the beach.
‘So, tomorrow is another day, maybe tomorrow we get lucky.’ Josh said, quietly, ‘You have to earn luck.’
‘Have we? Have we earned it?’
‘Not yet,’ Josh said.
Chapter Thirteen
Josh drove.
They had come over the heavy wood bridge at Wolgast, crossed the wide Peene-Strom. He had driven for an hour and a half east from Rostock. She checked the map. She told him where to turn off the big highway that headed for the Polish border.
Until then the talk had been desultory, as if both were too bruised from the day and the night before. But when the forest closed around the road, high, dense pines, straight, towering trees that hid the light, Mantle told her the history of the place.
‘On the night of the seventeenth of August nineteen forty- three, five hundred and ninety-six aircraft were sent here, everything that could fly from the bomber bases in the east of England. The target was Peenemunde where there was the programme for the development of the V2 rocket. There was a clear moon, a rotten night to come. If the target of Peenemunde had not been so critical, they wouldn’t have been asked to fly on a night like that. They were told that if they didn’t crack the target then they’d have to come back and do it all again, face the air defence again, and keep coming back till they’d cracked it. There were three target areas at Peenemunde, pushed up close to each other. The strike had to be really exact.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I read about it. The pilots of the bombers, of course, had never heard of Peenemunde. They weren’t told what was on the ground, just that it was important. There was a firestorm, the casualties were horrendous. But the bomber crews took bad casualties as well, because of the moon, lost forty-nine aircraft over the target and on the way back.’
‘Is that how you spend your evenings, reading about what’s gone?’
‘I read history because it’s important to me. The target area was comprehensively hit. The best of the German rocket scientists were here, and they were creating what was to be the best weapon of the war. Even though the target was pulped, the science survived. The scientists, after nineteen forty-five, were snatched by the Russians and the Americans. Neal Armstrong’s walk came from here, and Apollo and Challenger and the shuttle, and Gagarin and the space stations. It’s all about Peenemunde.’
Tracy said, distantly, ‘Did your wife leave you because you lectured her on what’s gone?’
He said, quietly, ‘I can’t help what drives me. Out of history comes everything. Codes, morals, ethics, they’re all learned from history. Why we’re here today, why we have to be here, is because of the need to learn the lessons of history.’
‘You were better quiet, better when you didn’t lecture.’
‘Please, Tracy, listen. History breeds principles. The history of Peenemunde is about fantastic scientific achievement, but it’s also about slave-labour compounds and about starvation and about men working until they died of exhaustion. That was wrong. The people who were here then, they closed their eyes to what was wrong, believed the wrong — slave labour — did not matter. They wanted to ignore principles, but principles are the core of life.’
‘Did she have to listen to your lectures before she left?’
‘You come to Peenemunde, Tracy, and you learn what was wrong, you learn about when principles were ignored. To get the rockets to London, to develop the science to put a man on the moon, slave labourers died of starvation and exhaustion. It’s the same story. It’s why I’m here. It was wrong to shoot Hans Becker. That is a principle and I try to live by it.’
‘Me, I only want to see the bastard hammered.’
‘You have to know why. You have to hold the principle as faith.’
She closed her eyes and turned away. They went through Trassenheide and Karlshagen, and he saw the cemetery with the exact lines of the stones, and he came to Peenemunde where the bombers had flown. Without principles his life would have been emptied.
‘I talk,’ Josh said, cold. ‘We are quite close. There won’t be any more lectures or much more history . . . I talk and you write it down.’
The man walked away, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his old coat, and was lost among the first tourists of the day.
Heinz Gerber had been sweeping the roadway that led past the scale-sized model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, past the old Me 163, the MiG-21 and the MiG-23 on their concrete stands. It was his job, each day, to sweep the roadway from the Feld Salon Wagen that had been used by the former ministers and generals, and which was now a café, and clear the rubbish and wrappings all the length of the roadway to the harbour where the Type P21 gunboat was moored. He was qualified
to sweep the roadway because he had once been in charge of the refuse collection of a small town. The people he worked with did not know of his former life. It was his nightmare, lived alone in the dark hours of the single room he rented in Karlshagen, that it should be known he was a man accused of thieving precious money from his church . . He could never go back. There had been silence in the street when he had left his home. They had all believed it, that he had stolen from the church box, because it was what they had been told.
When he had first come to Peenemunde it had been to clean and scrub the sleeping quarters of the conscript soldiers of the military base. When they had left, he had been given the work of sweeping and brushing the roadway of the new museum.
He had finished the work, brushed the small heap of paper, dirt and wrappings on to his shovel. He had tipped the heap into his wheelbarrow. The roadway behind him was cleaned. He had left the wheelbarrow there, near to the model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, with the brush and shovel laid neatly on it. He loved his work. He had gone to the store shed, near to the models of the SA2B and SA5 ground-to-air missiles, and lifted a coil of rope down from a nail. He loved to work with his brush and shovel and wheelbarrow, and he did not care whether the heat stifled him or whether it rained or whether the snow came.
He walked out, past the big Soviet troop-carrying helicopter, towards the pine forest and the path he took each day to and from his single room in Karlshagen. He loved the daylight: the nightmare only came with the darkness. He carried the rope into the forest, where the light was shut out by the high canopy.
Josef Siehl watched them pay the woman at the kiosk and take the tickets. He recognized her because he had seen her sit beside the lighthouse on the breakwater and throw flowers into the sea. He watched from his car. He recognized the man who had held the Leutnant and threatened to kill him, and he had believed the man. He watched them speak to the woman in the kiosk, who shrugged and pointed towards the roadway and the aircraft and the models of the rockets.
The brevity of her note was typical of Olive Harris.
An hour before the meeting she had circulated it to the personal assistant of the deputy director general, with copies to the assistant deputy director and to Fleming of German Desk. She had sat at her desk late into the previous evening, and she had come again early to Vauxhall Bridge Cross to check the note and make some, few, slight revisions to the text. Olive Harris succeeded, in a man’s world, by the clarity of her thought and by the instant dismissal of what she regarded as unnecessary.
She explained the concept of her plan.
‘The so-called seekers after truth — the young woman, Barnes, and the man who has tagged on to her, Mantle — they are unimportant. She is directed by sentimentality, he is governed by naïve notions of retribution. They are a minor sideshow and should be ignored.’
The deputy director had come down from his quarters high in the building to the office suite of the assistant deputy director. He listened without comment, his angled chin supported by his fists, his elbows on the table. It would be his decision.
‘Krause is irrelevant. He is a small-time bit player. Whether he committed murder in cold blood is of no concern to us.’
The coffee provided by the assistant deputy director remained untouched, the biscuits uneaten. He would never interrupt Olive Harris and would seldom contradict her.
‘The carping between the German agencies, BfV and BND, and ourselves on the issue of influence in Washington is frankly demeaning. It may be sustainable by dwarf-sized minds. If we seek a position of supremacy then we should justify that position by achievement, not by whining.’
Fleming sat beside her. He had sniffed when she had sat down and he reckoned that she wore no scent.
‘But Perkins, plodding in Rostock, has provided us with the ammunition for sniping at a target of consequence. The situation
— we have the growing restlessness of the Russian military, we have a defence minister being kicked towards action, we have a minister gaining increasing popularity from the officer corps of the military, we have the ever present frustration of the military for the current civilian leadership. That is the situation. Behind the minister, with obvious and dominant influence over him, is Colonel Pyotr Rykov. He is a target of consequence. Do they want — in Downing Street, in the White House, the Elysee, in the Quirinale — a military government in Russia? Do they hell. They prefer civilian corruption, political inefficiency, the chaos we have at present. I want those video-tapes for myself. I have explained how they should be used, because they provide us with the opportunity to target Colonel Pyotr Rykov.’
She looked each of them, in turn, in the eye. Fleming looked away. The assistant deputy director dropped his head. It would be the deputy director’s decision.
‘Thank you, Olive. It can be assumed that you’re known in Moscow?’
She said, scornful, ‘Of course I’m known.’
‘It can be assumed that you would be recognized?’
She said, proud, ‘Of course I would be recognized.’
Then, on a misty dank morning, in the cream and green building that dominated the southern bank of the Thames river, they diverted attention from the former Hauptman Dieter Krause to Colonel Pyotr Rykov. It was done with effortless ease.
The meeting broke.
Fleming walked back to his office. He felt crushed and knew it was because he had not spoken out.
The woman in the kiosk had said that they would find Heinz Gerber sweeping the roadway. There was no one sweeping the roadway. They had waited by the abandoned wheelbarrow.
The man who painted the aircraft had said that Heinz Gerber might have gone for his Pinkel pause, and explained how long in each hour it was permitted to go to the lavatory. They had stood outside the toilet block at the front of the power station.
‘Where the bloody hell is he?’
‘I don’t know — how would I know?’
‘If you hadn’t spent so bloody long jerking off with all that crap about principles, boring the arse off me—’
‘I want to find him, Tracy, as much as you want to find him — maybe more. And your foul little mouth won’t help me to find him.’
She sagged. ‘Where is he, Josh, please?’
‘We just have to look again.’
Albert Perkins walked from the bank near his hotel back into the old walled city. The street, leading up from the mighty shape of the Marienkirche, was filled with old men and old women. Little slipped by the eyes of the intelligence officer from Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He thought that the faces of the older men and women showed the despair that came from a lifetime of sustained defeat. The oldest men would have gone from these streets to the battlefields of Stalingrad and Kürsk and north Africa and France, and defeat. The oldest women would have seen the Red Army come, and the Stasi and the apparatchiks of the Party, and would have hugged their thoughts to their chests, and known the fear that was defeat.
The shop was empty, again. He walked inside.
He was led to the back. The former Oberstleutnant unlocked the heavy door and led him down the steps into the museum cellar.
‘You have the money?’
‘You wish to check?’
Each of the video-cassettes was inserted into the player and the first thirty seconds of each was shown on the screen. . . More than a flight of fancy for Albert Perkins. God’s truth, they had kept him awake and aroused and tossing. They were wrapped in brown paper and put in a plastic supermarket bag. He handed over the envelope and watched the man count the money, hundred-DM notes, interminably slowly, with concentration. Perkins’s eyes meandered. It was the weathered log that intrigued him most, with the peeled bark. If it had been by his feet, in Bushy Park close to his home, if the grass had grown around it, he did not believe he would have noticed it.
There was a chuckle behind him. ‘It is good, yes? I think you copied it, I think you used a copy in Ireland. I think we were the first. I think we were the best, yes?’
The former Oberstleutnant grinned cheerfully. ‘I do not take offence. The world changes, we adapt or we die. I do not complain. You should know I have a great pride in the quality of material on those three tapes. I went, a year before the end, to Leipzig to help with their surveillance techniques. It was two days before the Christmas of nineteen eighty-eight. There was a party that night and I showed my material. I received a standing ovation, I was applauded for its quality. Why do you wish to hurt them?’
‘Hurt who?’
‘When you buy a ten-year-old film of Frau Krause fucking with a Russian officer, then you go into the gutter to hurt either Frau Krause or the Russian officer. What have they done to you that they deserve to be hurt?’
Perkins turned away. He climbed the steps out of the cellar, he crossed the shop, he did not wish the man a good day. He walked out onto the street.
A week before, seven clear days, if he had been told that he could go to Peenemunde, Josh Mantle would have hugged the man who gave him the invitation. It should have been the place where the bare pages of books took life. He would have yearned, seven clear days before, to walk in that place of history.
It was the fourth time that they had tracked the length and breadth of the museum area.
He no longer cared for the history.
He had been through the smaller museum that housed the wartime exhibits — and his eyes had not caught the photographs of the V2 development, or the encased slave-labourer’s uniform that dressed a dummy, or the little personal possessions of the test pilots who had flown the Me 163 jet prototypes, or the artist’s impression of the Lancaster bombers over Peenemunde.
The Waiting Time Page 27