The Waiting Time

by Gerald Seymour

  She drove past the police station. The shops had closed for the evening. It was too cold, too early in the year, for tourists, and the pavements were empty, the building sites of the new holiday hotels silent. She parked at the railway station, from which the S-Bahn trains ran to Rostock, in shadow, the furthest place she could find from the lights. The wind came harsh off the sea channel and across the quayside and tore at them. He had told her where she should park and for once there was no trace of scorn at her lips. He had found again his strength, because she had thanked him, and she was beside him, walking from the car, elf small and tired, and he thought she now depended on him.

  She slipped her hand onto his elbow, and they walked together towards the bridge over the smaller channel.

  On the plank bridge, flanked on the far side by the old houses of Warnemunde that were now painted, chic and the homes of new money, and on the near side by the fish harbour where the boats were, they stopped.

  The fleet, tied up with heavy ropes, was of small boats all painted in a uniform red from bow to stern with a white flash running their length above the water-line and with white wheel- houses. Men in dark heavy coats and boots worked on the decks by the light of small arc lamps high on posts above the quay. They coiled ropes, scrubbed decks and stowed nets.

  Beside the moored boats, above them, was the drab concrete of the quayside. From small stalls on the quay, gross large women, swaddled in stained aprons, sold raw herring-fillet strips and bread, or shredded crab and bread, or smoked fish and bread, or pickled onions and raw fish and smoked fish and bread, and pits beer. They did poor trade because the men were still at the boats and the tourists had not yet come.

  Along the quay and the stalls was a concrete shed, bright- lit, and in it were men and women, old and young, gutting the fish catch, which the kids brought them from the boats, on wide bench tables. Cats howled by their booted feet, screamed for carcasses. Beyond the brightness and movement in the shed was the dull greyness of the quay, and beyond the quay was the blackness of the water.

  Josh took her hand, where it rested on his elbow. He squeezed it, held it tight.

  They walked down the ramp towards the quayside, the boats and the gutting shed. A man lumbered towards them, a rolled wool cap on his head, a beard darkening his face and a loose dark coat on his body, carrying a box of gutted fish and powder ice.

  ‘Excuse me, mein Freund, where do I find the boat on which Willi Muller works?’

  The man did not look up, paused bent under the weight of the box, and jerked his head backwards, directed them towards the long line of boats moored to the quayside and riding on the blackness of the water. The pastor had said that Willi Muller would now be twenty-four. They went by the end of the gutting shed and he could see no young man, dressed in the dark clothes and boots of a fisherman, with a box of fish or a bucket of powder ice, among the white-coated and white-aproned men and women at the work benches.

  He came to a stall. Moths bounced in the wind around a naked bulb hanging above the raw fish fillets and the smoked fish fillets and the bread.

  ‘Excuse me, meine Frau, where do I find the boat of Willi Muller?’

  The woman buttered bread and she did not look up from her work. She made the gesture with the knife, away down the quay, away towards the darkness at its end. They walked past stalls, past small unused tables, past men working on their boats, past the kids who carried the fish catch from the boats to the gutting shed.

  A man worked at the repair of his net, fast gnarled hands made good a rip. He leaned against his wheelhouse and the net was gathered up across his knees. Josh asked, again, for Willi Muller. The man flashed his face, away, towards the far end of the quayside, towards two boats, empty, in the last fall of the light. He held her hand, crushed it . . . Step quickening, stride lengthening, holding her hand and dragging her behind him... Past the boats that were empty, towards the boat that was a rocking shadow shape beyond the point where the light failed. It was the last chance.

  Nothing moved on the boat but the slow tossing of the mast and the waving of rigging in the wind. He stood on the quay, his body thrown against the wheelhouse, giant-sized, by the high arc lights far behind him, grey black on grey white. He looked the length of the boat, over stowed netting, coiled rope and stacked boxes. She jerked his arm, she pointed. He looked down into the blackness of the water.

  He saw the darkened figure floating there. The figure moved so slowly, so gently, half submerged against the angled bow of the trawler. It wore the dark coat of the fishermen on their boats behind him.

  Josh screamed out loud.

  The figure rose and fell on the swell of the channel.

  He screamed because it had been the last chance, because it had all been for nothing...

  Chapter Sixteen

  The trawlermen on their boats, at their nets and ropes and buckets and brushes, would have heard his agony cry, and the women at the stalls, and the fish gutters in the shed.

  Josh pushed her away from him.

  He pulled off his coat, and his blazer jacket. They would have seen him stand for a moment on the quay above the darkened boat and the black water. They would have left their boats, their stalls, the gutting shed, left their boxes of fish and powder ice, and have come to the end of the quay where the light did not reach. A narrow, rusted ladder was fastened to the quayside wall. It went down, twice a man’s height, into the darkness, to the black water. It disappeared in the water, close to the bow of the boat, to the figure, half submerged and half floating.

  He was a driven man. He did not look back, not at her, not at the men and women and the kids coming from the lit end of the quay. He went over the side, down the ochre rusted rungs of the ladder. It sagged. A bolt into the wall was torn clear by his weight.

  The water came chill into his shoes, gripped the legs of his trousers. He shuddered at the cold.

  He could see the figure, the back of the torso. It was an outline against the oiled black water that slopped against the bow angle of the boat. The water was against his chest and lapped into his armpits. He held the rung that was level with his head, left hand, and he reached out, right hand, towards the figure that rose and fell in the motion of the water. He stretched, but could not reach it, could not hook his fingers, frozen wet, into the coat.

  His hand thrashed in the water and the eddies took the figure a few more inches, so tantalizing, away from him. He reached out and there was only the water for his fingers to snatch at.

  The rung, rusted, that he held, gave and broke. He was pitched into the water. The foulness of the oil, the sharpness of salt, was in his eyes and mouth and nose. He kicked, gasped, and came up. It was years since he had last swum, and then in a heated pool. He spluttered, choked. He had to reach it. It was his obligation. His shoes were against the wall of the quay, sliding on underwater weed. He pushed away from the quay wall. Three strokes, four, and he would be within reach, if he stretched. He coughed the oil water clear from his throat, his eyes were closed. He lunged. He could not see ahead.

  His hand caught it.

  He smelt the stench of it.

  It came so easily to him, it had no weight.

  He pulled it to him. He trod the water. He lifted above his head a black coal sack from the blackness of the water and rotting herring heads spilled from its neck. Around her, above him, were the trawlermen and the stall women and the fish gutters and the kids who carried the boxes. He saw the glistening light of the eyes that gazed down on him. His screams that had brought them had been of agony and pain. At that moment, Josh screamed with hysterical, lunatic laughter. He threw the sack and its debris away and out beyond the bow angle of the boat. He swam back to the ladder. Hands reached down for him. Men knelt to help him. Hard rough hands caught his wrists, caught at the shoulder of his shirt. He was heaved up. All the time they lifted him he laughed. They pulled him over the broken rung of the ladder. He had no control over his arms, his legs. He shook with the cold and the laughter burs
t through him.

  Below him, the sack drifted away towards the current.

  The water spilled from his shoes and ran down his body.

  All around her, they laughed with him, as if an idiot should be humoured.

  Tracy said, ‘He’s at sea. He’s safe. He’s up the coast and after the herring. A man just told me. They’re due back in tomorrow afternoon. He’s safe from them.’

  The words came through his chattering teeth. ‘Wouldn’t have minded knowing that earlier.’

  ‘He was due in today — stayed out another twenty-four hours. Only the crew of the sister ship knew it.’

  He kicked off his shoes, peeled off his trousers and dragged off his shirt. He stood, a moment, in the evening air, in his sodden underclothes and soaked socks. The laughter convulsed him. He shrugged into his blazer jacket and wrapped the arms of his coat around his waist. The body of the coat hung over his legs as an apron would have. He picked up his shoes and shook the last of the water from them.

  They walked away. She carried his trousers and his shirt. He hobbled in his socks on the coarse concrete of the quayside and she left a dribbled trail of water behind her. He led her past the back of the gutting shed, where they could hug the shadows of the harbour’s lorry park and slip unseen back towards the car.

  Josh said, ‘It was the moment we won, Tracy. Can you see that? It’s the first time that it’s turned for us.’

  Willi Muller’s life was the sea and his family were the crew and his home was the boat. On a small stove, powered by kerosene fuel, in a wide pan of sliding lard fat, he cooked porkmeat sausages. On the second hot ring of the stove he poured milk from a bottle and water from a kettle on to the dehydrated potato powder. They were far out in the Ostsee, east from the Wittow peninsula of Rugen Island, and north from the island bay that was called Tromper Wiek. They were at the limit range of the trawler boat that carried the designation WAR 79 on the white strip above the red-painted hull. The sister boat, WAR 31, in the early morning, had sailed for Warnemunde with its hold not yet filled with herring, but WAR 79 had stayed out as the wind had freshened and the sea had risen. His life was the sea and he had no fear of the sea wind and the sea waves. The wind hit the boat and the waves made it shudder, but the only fear he knew was when the memories came of the men with the guns dragging the body back to the pier, and aiming the guns at him and ordering him again to start the engine. The guns had been against his neck and his back, and he had helped to pitch the weighted body into the waters of the Salzhaff. He did not believe, ever, that the wind and the waves would make a worse fear for him than the guns had made.. . They drifted on low power, rolling in the water. The sea spray came across the windows of the small wheelhouse. It would be the third night they were out but the herring run, at last, was good. Because it was the third night, there were only sausages to eat with powdered potato and one apple for each of them. There would be old bread for breakfast in the morning and more coffee. They would fish through the night and before dawn they would head back west for Warnemunde.

  His family were the skipper and the mate. They were brothers. They had been at sea together for fifty-two years. They had gone to sea together, the skipper and the mate, in 1944, in the submarines from the port of Brest, out into the dark Atlantic waters when the codes were broken and the enemy’s bombers and destroyers had hunted out the wolfpacks. They had taught him, as fathers and uncles teach, that the sea was not meant to claim them. The old brothers, wizened, thin, gaunt, bent, were the family he loved. There had been another family, long before, and he was shamed by his mother, who had said her son should swear his silence so that she would not lose her house, and she had kept the house. His father had said that he would lose his boat in Rerik unless his son went away, and his father had not lost his fishing boat. He would never go back to them. To go back was to face the shame of them. The old brothers’ boat was the only home he now knew. When they were tied to the quay at Warnemunde, sheltered from the wind and the waves, he slept on the boat. The frayed quilted sleeping bag came out at night, in harbour, from his wood chest below the wheel. His home was a place streaked with engine oil, where the paint flaked loose, where the floor was splintered planks, where all the possessions he owned fitted in the rough-built wooden box that the skipper and mate had made for him. The sea was the life of Will Muller, and the crew were his family, and trawler WAR 79 was his home.

  He knew no fear here because the fear was in the past, with the shame.

  He had paid a Turk for the use of her. She was 175 DMs for an hour and a half. There would have been a Turk pimping for her in Leipzig and, in Leipzig, a Turk would have charged him 250 DMs, minimum. He had found her on the Am Strande, and he had paid the Turk and driven her, followed her directions, to an apartment in a block in the Sudstadt.

  Gunther Peters thought she was new to it. She had the gear, open blouse under a windcheater, and the short skirt, riding high on her thighs, hair rinsed platinum blonde, mouth coated with mauve lipstick. The gear was right but she didn’t know her trade. She wore a wedding ring, a television was playing in the living room, and children were sleeping in the other bedroom. He had done it twice and he had felt nothing. He thought that her husband would be out cleaning streets or polishing cars or washing dishes. She lay on her back and she had her legs still stretched wide as if she thought that necessary. She was skinny, white- fleshed, and dark-haired where it wasn’t rinsed from the bottle. He had come to Am Strande to look for a tart because it was not important for him to watch the harbour at Warnemunde that evening. Tomorrow was important. . . To use his hour and a half, he had thought about tomorrow, when the boy came back on the boat. Gunther Peters dressed slowly. He had time to kill.

  Hoffmann had quit, and Siehl and Fischer, coward bastards. Only himself and the Hauptman would be there tomorrow, at the harbour at Warnemunde. He felt no hostffity to the tart because she was useless.

  When he was dressed, when the Makharov was back in his tight, stretched belt, he gave her a good tip and said that he would drive her back to the Am Strande. After he dropped her, he had forgotten her thin white body within five minutes and was thinking only of tomorrow...

  * * *

  ‘We are off the record, nothing is attributed to me?’

  Albert Perkins nodded his agreement. It had been a long wait outside the office of the police chief. It would have been worthwhile. It was his luck that the police chief had served in Dortmund and, there, had worked closely with the British military, had been liaison officer between the German authorities and the British intelligence people trying, fingernail stuff, to keep a track on the Irish bombers targeting the British bases.

  ‘This is not a conversation that is happening?’

  Albert Perkins tapped his lips with an index finger. He had already flattered the younger man: without the excellent cooperation of the German police the Irish shits would have had free rein to bomb and kill.

  ‘The correct procedure would be for me to report your arrival to BfV in Cologne, and to seek guidance, but I do not think you wish that?’

  Albert Perkins shook his head and a grimace of mock pain crossed his face.

  The police chief for Rostock said, ‘I went two years ago, Doktor Perkins, to Berlin. There was to be a seminar on the investigations into criminal acts by the former officers of the Stasi. There were two days of lectures and, I tell you very frankly, the two days passed slowly. It was the evening between the days that was interesting, my eyes were opened. I went to dinner that evening with an officer from Berlin on the special-investigation team, codenamed Zerv, and I met with a bitter man. The unit was denied the federal funding and the manpower it needed to be operationally efficient. A combination of covert obstruction and lack of a political will created, my dinner guest told me, a de facto amnesty for the Stasi. He said the attitude of government was that the prosecution of the Stasi for criminal offences would lead only to a further alienation of the people of the eastern part of our country. He was a disi
llusioned man — twice in a lifetime the German nation was confronted with the crimes committed by a totalitarian regime, and twice the blind eye had been turned to illegality. You give me the opportunity, Doktor Perkins, to stand beside that bitter and disillusioned officer.’

  Albert Perkins ducked his head, the motion of respect. He could have done without the lecture, but listening to it was his route towards the facility he required for the next day.

  ‘The failure to prosecute the Stasi left the organization intact and emboldened, my dinner guest told me. He listed for me the prosecutions that could, should, have been brought. The theft of twenty-six billion DMs that should have gone to the treasury of a united Germany, four hundred cases of murder, torture and kidnapping, the destruction of the personality of many thousands of innocents. But that is the cold world of statistics. It was a good meal, we had the opportunity to eat well. But one story he told so disgusted me that the meal was an irrelevance. My guest investigated the death of a young man in the Stasi prison at Jena. He killed himself after the interrogation during which they played him a tape of the screams of a young woman and told him the screams, under torture, were those of his nine-months- pregnant girl-friend. There have been no prosecutions of the Stasi officers responsible for driving that young man to the despair of suicide.’

  A deep frown of concern cut Albert Perkins’s forehead.

  ‘They are intact, Doktor Perkins. They have a network, an organization, to which we give the name of Seilschalften. They are the source of organized crime in the old East. They have links with criminals in Russia. They are behind the illicit movement of arms, the narcotics trade, the theft of cars, they are expert in the recycling of fraudulently obtained monies. Through inaction, when the chance was there, Doktor Perkins, we have made a monster. I offer you co-operation.’