‘You are brilliant, you know that? Not just now, all the time, you are fantastic.’
He came off her, out of her. She lay with her wet warmth on him.
‘Thank you, Knautschke, for giving me happiness, thank you little hippopotamus for coming out of the mud.’
She giggled, ‘Daft bugger.’
She broke his hold. Her thigh was across his waist and her heel massaged between his legs. She leaned across him, her breasts hung fluttering on his chest.
‘What’s afterwards, Josh, for us? Not the crap you told me. What’s afterwards, Josh, for you and me?’
Chapter Seventeen
She lay on him, snuggled on him. The clock on the Marienkirche chimed midnight, big bells. He wanted, desperate for it, the warmth of her to last.
‘There is an afterwards, for us, for you and for me?’
‘It’s what I’m saying.’
He lay on his back on the mattress and he held her tight against him and his fingers played patterns on the small of her back, and her fingers made tangles with the hairs of his chest. To be his own man was to protect himself. He wanted to trust in the afterwards, to believe that it was not a fraud. He had seen it so many times before in the camps in Germany and the camps in the UK, men under stress and women under stress coupling together for strength and deluding themselves that there was an afterwards when the stress time had passed. He had seen the hurt that was left, two people broken, because the stress time was gone and there was no reality of afterwards. She had told him that before he went on the last bad one, the last bad mission, she had loved the boy to give him strength.
‘Is it enough, Tracy, after what we’ve shared, to make an afterwards?’
She kissed him. ‘It is for me, yes.’
He jerked, pushed himself up on his elbows.
She had offered him the prize, the trophy to be won.
He leaned against the cold damp of the wall and he took her face in his hands. He held her cheeks, gripped them, and against his hands was the smoothed narrowness of her neck.
‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘Afterwards is babies, Josh.’
‘I shouldn’t talk about it, because it isn’t finished.’
‘And puppies, Josh, little black bastards, peeing. . . And a place that’s our own, babies and puppies and fields...’
‘If I don’t have a plan then we lose.’
‘And no people, just a home and babies and puppies and fields...’
‘I love you, Tracy. I’m so thankful to you. I want it, your afterwards, I want to be with you for it. Can you understand? I’m so frightened. I don’t have a plan, I can’t think. . . I don’t delude myself, Tracy. If we don’t win tomorrow, there is no afterwards. Loving you, loving me, and I didn’t think it possible that I would find happiness again, find what you’ve given me, but it doesn’t count tomorrow. Have to think, can’t, have to have a plan...’
She slipped off him. The warmth was gone.
Her bed creaked, took her weight.
He tried to think, tried to make the plan. He could not find it and ebbed towards sleep.
‘Did she win?’
‘She won.’
‘You were proud of her?’
‘I was.’
‘Would she be proud of you, Hauptman?’
Gunther Peters oiled his smile. Only the two of them that night in the little annexe corner of the café. Peters let his hand, long thin fingers, rest on the fist of Dieter Krause, and asked his questions with a familiarity, as if the old ranking of Hauptman and Feidwebel was no longer of importance, as if they were equals. Peters’ fingers held tight on Krause’s fist.
He hesitated, uncertain. ‘I don’t know.’
‘A man is privileged when his daughter is proud of what he does.’
‘That is shit.’
‘I have had several days to think, Hauptman.’ Peters rolled the word on his tongue. He mocked. ‘Over the last several days I have thought of the future...’
‘Tomorrow it is finished, tomorrow is the end of the future.’
‘Tomorrow I go home, Hauptman? Tomorrow, after it is finished, I go home and you pretend I never came? You go to America, you are the big-shot man, you are free to fuck with your new friends, and I go home and you forget me? You don’t believe that, Hauptman, you cannot believe that.’
Krause tried to break the hold of the fingers on his fist. ‘We came together in common purpose and you go when the matter of common purpose is finished.’
‘I come at a price, Hauptman.’
Krause gazed into the eyes of the former Feidwebel. Peters had been just a face in the corridors, another junior who had snapped smartly to heel-clicking attention each time they passed, just a face sitting at a desk and the order had been shouted through the open door. They had been chosen, grabbed, commandeered, at random. He gazed into the face and the fingers relaxed on his fist.
‘What is the price?’ Krause growled.
‘That is not gracious, Hauptman, that is not generous.’
‘Tell me what is the price.’
‘I come from Leipzig. I leave my affairs, I cancel a business opportunity. I stay, I don’t run, I stand with you.’
‘What is your price?’
‘You give me orders and I obey them. You involve me, I do not complain. . . and then you wish to forget me, as you would drop the wrapping of a cigarette packet.’
‘What is the goddamn price?’
‘I can do as Hoffmann did, as Siehl and Fischer did. I can walk away. I was only a simple Feidwebel, I was carrying out the orders of my superior officer. That is the usual defence, yes? It does not suit me but it is an option. I can go to my car, I can be on the road, I can reach Leipzig by the morning, if a price is not paid.’
‘Tell me the price.’ Sweat beaded on the forehead of Dieter Krause
‘You have new friends?’
‘I have.’
‘Your new friends have influence?’
‘They have influence.’
‘They value you?’
‘What is the fucking price?’
‘Do you want to be alone tomorrow, Hauptman, when the trawler boat comes in? Can you do it yourself, Hauptman, remove the problem? You want to go to America with the problem behind you?’
‘Name the price.’
He talked softly, silky smoothly. ‘You have new friends with influence who value you. They would protect you. You are the ideal partner for me.’
‘Partner in what?’
‘I put cars out of the country, I put munitions into the country. I move money into Germany and out of Germany, and your new friends, if you were my partner, would protect me.’
‘That is criminal activity.’
‘What is it you do now?’ He laughed quietly. His laughter was without noise, without mirth. ‘Without me beside you tomorrow you fail. If you fail you go to the Moabit gaol. That is the price.’
He was trapped. He squirmed. The rat eyes faced him, and the thin fingers were held out to him. He would be, in the Moabit gaol, with the scum and the filth and the addicts and the foreign pimps. He thought he plunged over a cliff and fell, and fell.
Krause took the hand that was offered to him.
There had been no car to meet him at Moscow Military Headquarters.
He had rung the drivers’ pool office at Defence, and he had won no sense out of an idiot: the idiot did not know why he was not met at Moscow Military. He had telephoned his driver’s home and the call had rung out unanswered.
Pyotr Rykov had hitched a lift into the city. A drunk sergeant, veering over the roads, losing himself, had taken him near to his home.
He had walked on the street past the surveillance car, and each of the three men in the car, smoking behind the misted windows, had looked at him without expression.
Pyotr Rykov banged the door shut after him, and woke Irma. She said, sleepy in her bed, that the telephone did not work and would he have it fixed in the morning.
&nbs
p; He stood by the window with the darkness of the living room behind him. His driver, his old friend who should have been at Moscow Military, had told him that he should be careful. He had said, his reply defiant, that the minister was the guarantee of his security.
Pyotr Rykov did not know that the brass plate bearing his name had been unscrewed from the door of the office next to the suite of the minister. He did not know that three video-cassettes had been watched in full in the Lubyanka, or that the number of his laminated ID card had been given to the guards at the four doors of the ministry with instructions that he be refused entry. He did not know the name of Olive Harris, or of her plan. . . He looked down onto the surveillance car . . . Pyotr Rykov did not recognize the moment he had not been careful and had made the mistake. He could not recall that moment.
Away up the channel the sea spray burst on the breakwater.
The rotating lamp, millions of units of candlepower, caught the spray and lost it. The light moved on, thrusting out over the whiteness of the seascape, before bouncing back from the mist of low cloud, turning again. A small boat was paddled up the calm water of the channel towards the thunder rumble at the breakwater and the moving lamp of the lighthouse. The boat had been taken from the inner harbour. Cold, trembling fingers had freed the boat from the iron ring on the quay wall.
It was a vicious night. Darkened houses and shops beyond the quay on the one side of the channel, darkened boats and stalls and the darkened fish-gutting shed on the other. Not a night, in the small bad hours, for man or beast to be out. Not a fisherman yet out of his bed, not a cat moving from the warmth of a kitchen.
The swell was with the small boat when it came level with the length of the breakwater. The lamp of the lighthouse found the small boat and discarded it. It lurched hard against the rocks of the breakwater’s base, was lifted and fell.
A scrambled crawl over the wet grease on the rocks, and the mooring rope of the small boat was tied, the same trembling, cold, wet fingers, to a post on the breakwater’s low rail.
Olive Harris slept.
She slept untroubled, and did not dream. The pill, taken with a half-glass of water, ensured that she slept free of troublesome images. She didn’t see the faces of those who were, to her, irrelevant and a sideshow, nor did she see the face of the man she had described as a target of consequence.
It was important for her, in the small strange bed on the top floor of the embassy block, to sleep well because the morning would bring the start of a long day, unpredictable and dangerous but with the potential of high reward.
There was a clear printed sign in the police car. It forbade the smoking of cigarette, cigar or pipe tobacco.
Sometimes, on the night shift, when they were parked up and waiting for a call on the radio, if he was with a friend, the policeman could wind down the windows and smoke in the car. Not with her, not with the bitch fresh out of the training school at Dummerstorf-Waldeck. She sat in the driver’s seat and pecked a plastic spoon into a carton of yoghurt, and he stood outside the car in the shadow beneath the block on Plater Strasse, and smoked a Dutch-made cigarillo. The wind brought the sleet shower off the Unterwarnow and across the Am Strande, funnelled it up the narrow road and gusted it into Plater Strasse. He cupped the cigarillo in his hand. He sheltered in the doorway of a shuttered restaurant. His arm was tugged. He had been watching her in the car, finishing the goddamn yoghurt, starting on the cholesterol-free sandwich filled with low-fat cheese and tomato. What she needed was a good smoke and a good drink and a good sausage and a good fuck. The recruits today were shit...
A street map was held in front of him. There was no light nearby. He shone his torch on the map and tried to hold it and his cigarillo and the map that blew in the wet wind. He strained to find the road he was asked for. The sleet came onto his spectacles. The knee came into his testicles. He gasped. The breath spurted from his throat. He was jack-knifed by the pain, head going down towards his knees, spectacles flying towards the paving. A hand chopped down on the back of his exposed neck, the hard heel of a hand. He was in the shadow behind the car, and the bitch ate her sandwich. He sagged to his knees and clutched at his stomach, fell. Hands tore at the pistol holster on his belt, ripped at the pouch for the handcuffs and their key. The sick pain squeezed his eyes shut. He heard the brush whisper of feet receding, running.
He crawled, gasping, heaving, towards the door of the police car where she ate her sandwich.
He had drunk the whisky, Scotch and Irish, from the room’s cocktail cupboard and now he opened the bourbon miniature.
It was always a long night for Albert Perkins before an operation was launched the following day. After the Jack Daniel’s there was gin, which he detested, and vodka, which he thought of as a woman’s drink, but he would not take out the champagne quarter-bottle, not when the result of the mission was undecided.
He had rung home four times, first at ten o’clock and then again on each hour. She should have been back by midnight. Certainly, by one o’clock she should have been home to complain that she was asleep and that he had woken her. He had not rung again after one o’clock. The ice was finished. It was always in hotel bedrooms, with the ice finished and the whisky, that he spent the nights before an operation went to its end.
The missions that mattered were those in which men such as Albert Perkins were powerless to intervene in the last crucial hours. They didn’t accept that powerlessness, those back home, those who commanded from the bunkers of the old Century House or the new Vauxhall Bridge Cross; of course they did not accept limit on their omnipotence. Albert Perkins knew it. He had once before, unusually consumed by his own frailty, drunk himself to oblivion on the night before the crucial hours.
There was a hotel at Luchow, south east on Route 216 from Luneburg, and across the minefields, fences and past the watch- towers was Salzwedel. It had taken eight months of Albert Perkins’s life, and a quarter of a million DMs, to get to the point where he had drunk a hotel cabinet dry and waited for a man to come through the checkpoint on the Luchow to Salzwedel road. The summer of ‘85, the trees along the road pretty on both sides of the minefields and the fences, the fields yellow with ripe crops either side of the watch-towers. No power, no influence. In his binoculars he had seen the car stopped at their checkpoint. All so dreary and mute through the magnification of the binoculars, a man taken out of a car and escorted into a building and then driven away until the car that carried him was lost among the fields and trees behind the minefields, the fences, the watch- towers. Nothing he could have done to intervene on the side of the NationalVolksArmee officer bringing over the Soviet battle order, defensive strategy.
He let the miniature bottle, the Jack Daniel’s, slip through his fingers and fall to the carpet. There was no tonic and no ice. He made a mix of orange juice and gin.
There were no minefields in Rostock, no death strips, no fences, no watch-towers and no dogs, but eating him was the same sensation of helplessness, of impotence, he had known too well. In three, four hours it would be dawn. With the dawn would come the start, the ticking clock, of the critical hours, and he would not be able to intervene. He reached, groped with a wavering hand, for the miniature of vodka, and he heard beyond the window the howl of police sirens in the night.
The great mouth of the hippopotamus crunched on the man, and he screamed. The scream filled his mind. He crabbed with his knees and the blankets would have slipped, and the cold would have settled on him. The scream.. . Josh woke.
He heard the scream of a siren going by the pension.
He shook, tried to scrape from his mind the intensity of the dream. Another siren was blasting further in the distance, and another coming closer. He glanced down at his watch, at the luminous markings, past three o’clock, and he looked across at her to see if she slept. He could see the shape of her in the bed, couldn’t hear her breathing, could hear only the sirens, as though they were cats chorusing. He settled. He turned his back to the window and her bed, and p
ulled the blankets close around him.
He shivered.
The draught blew on his back. Josh, so slowly, so carefully, turned over again and saw that the curtain, beyond the silhouette shape of her in the bed, blustered out into the room. Behind the curtain was the grinding sound of the window being forced upwards.
He tensed. He was naked under the blankets.
The curtains parted. It was hard for him to see. The leg edged between the curtains. He strained to see better. The window was half a dozen feet from the bed. The second leg came through the curtains, and Josh saw the bulk of the body looming above the bed where she slept, still, silent. The body shape, big against the curtain, moved towards the bed.
He had no weapon. Of course they’d found the fucking place. They’d had enough bloody days to find it.
He coiled his strength.
He erupted off his mattress.
The blankets caught in his legs and he thrashed them clear. He went over the bed, over her, groped for the shape. Waiting for the blow with a cosh or the flash hammer of a shot. Scrabbling to get his fingers into the bastard.
They were down.
They were beside the bed. Trying to get at the throat. He found the throat.
The gasped voice: ‘For fuck’s sake . . . Josh . . . leave it, leave it out...’
He was frozen rigid.
The coughing voice: ‘Christ, Josh. . . pack it. . . daft bugger, get off me!’
He knelt above her. He sighed into his lungs great draughts of chill air. He loosed his hands and they shook: he could not control them. He could have wept. She came from under him, wriggled clear of him. She crawled towards the bed and reached for the light switch. He knelt in his nakedness. She slammed down the window and fastened it. He saw the shape in the bed, a bolster and a pillow. She was dressed for the cold of the night and she rubbed gloved hands on her throat. He felt a great and savage bitterness. He stood, naked, in front of her, and he trembled.
The Waiting Time Page 34