The Waiting Time

by Gerald Seymour

  The drive of the snow was into his face, the force of the wind against his body. He fired until the magazine was exhausted, until the boat was lost against the hull of the trawler.

  She threw the rope to the man who fed the gulls. The small open boat clattered against the wood planks of the trawler. Josh reached up and caught at the low rail. It took his weight and his feet kicked at air below him. He dragged himself over and fell onto the slithering mess of fish carcasses. She came after him. The man who held the rope had an old, beaten face, and there was another face, as old and wizened, that peered from the door of the wheelhouse. At the wheel was a younger man. The gulls screamed above him. Josh stood, fell, stood again. He took the pistol from his belt.

  He shouted, against the gull cries, against the engine drive, against the wind whistle in the wires.

  ‘Which is Muller? Which is Willi Muller?’

  A thin, aged arm, a gaunt, scarred finger, pointed to the wheelhouse.

  ‘Willi Muller from Rerik?’

  The head, lined, unshaven and weathered, nodded.

  Josh yelled, ‘He stays, you go.’

  They went without argument, over the side of the trawler and down into the boat. They went as old men would who have known the authority of command, as old soldiers would have gone, too wise as survivors to confront a gun. They were cast off.

  Josh was in the wheelhouse.

  He was a tall young man with blond tangled hair and a lean face. He held the wheel easily. Josh had the pistol close to his head.

  ‘Turn her round, bring her back out.’

  The wheel was swung. Josh saw, through the water spray running down the wheelhouse window, their boat moving away from them. The two men had control of it and paddled it easily, and he saw Krause on the breakwater and the man with him. The young man stared straight ahead and the trawler pitched back towards the open sea. Tracy stood behind Josh.

  ‘You are Willi Muller?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You worked your father’s boat in Rerik? And, in November of nineteen eighty-eight you took your father’s boat out for the Stasi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You lifted a man from the Salzhaff? You saw him killed ashore?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was from your boat the body of the man was thrown back, weighted, into the Salzhaff?’

  She beat the questions at him, savage, and his voice quavered the answers, afraid.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want your evidence of murder. I’m taking you home.’ The shoulders of the young man shook. The colour of his face had gone. They went towards the west, beyond the small shelter of the breakwater, towards the last glimmer of the day’s light.

  They watched the trawler going. They watched it head for the reddening ribbon of the dusk.

  ‘They are going to Rerik,’ Peters said. ‘They have been out four days, they will have little fuel left but they would have enough fuel to reach Rerik. We should meet them at Rerik.’

  They walked back along the length of the breakwater.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We are taking you home.’

  The young man, Willi Muller, moved, dull-eyed, in the small space of the wheelhouse. She dominated him, was at his shoulder as he checked the fuel gauge where the needle was close to the red line.

  ‘You have not dared to go home.’

  She was close behind him when he squinted down at the compass, where the needle rocked with the pitch motion of the trawler, and when he took the wheel from Josh and set the course to the west.

  ‘You let the fear, as a coward would, cripple you.’

  She was above him when he lifted the hatch from the engine viewing box and peered with a torch down at the throbbed movement of the pistons.

  ‘Without me, what I give you, you wifi always cringe, a kicked dog, with the fear.’

  She was with him when he walked on the swaying stern deck, among the fish carcasses, to satisfy himself that the nets were stowed, the ropes coiled, and that the bilge pumps were operating.

  ‘Don’t think I apologize for coming into your life. You are a witness to murder. Fight me and you are an accessory to murder. But you are a coward, you won’t fight me.’

  She followed him, tracked him. Josh thought she overwhelmed him.

  ‘The hiding time is over. You can’t run any more. You have to have the guts now — about time — to stand. You are going home.’

  He read her and he thought her vicious. He could not see in her the woman who had come to his mattress, who had loved him, who had given and shared warmth, who had kissed his mouth so sweetly. She followed the young man because she did not care to give him room to think, she tracked him so that he was never free of her. There had been a savagery in her voice and she had set herself the task to obliterate the resistance of the young man. She surprised Josh, the professional: he had thought it would be him that played hard, and she would play soft. He had reckoned she would be close to the young man and seep a gentle voice into his ear and seduce the story from him. She would, he thought, have massaged the fear from him and coaxed out the story. He wished she had...

  He held the wheel, he kept the compass course, and the engine droned in his ears. A small reflex action, but he took a hand from the wheel and straightened the tie knot at his collar, and then, again, both hands, he gripped the wheel. He thought back, a long time back, when he had bullied a man to his death. In the woodman’s hut, in the heat, the mosquitoes at his face, his hands, his ankles, he had done it himself before he was his own man.

  The sea swell cascaded onto the side of the trawler as they went west into the grey dark seascape beyond the window. The line of the land was a black ribbon and against the ribbon was the white of waves breaking on a sand beach. In the black ribbon, moving slowly and keeping pace with them, difficult to see but always present, were the car’s lights.

  Willi Muller said, ‘I think the storm is blown out.’

  ‘Don’t give me shit about the storm.’

  ‘I think we will have a good evening, very soon. When there is a bad time in the Ostsee, it is difficult but it does not last.’

  ‘They will hunt you, without us, find you, without us, kill you, without us.’

  ‘The storm will soon, very soon, be finished.’

  ‘You have to chuck the fear, stop playing the coward, you have to go home.’

  ‘I think the storm will be finished when we reach Rerik.’

  He had, Josh thought, a fine, open young face. They had taken his life and tossed it, as if into the wind and the dark of the swell, hacked into a stranger’s life.

  Josh called behind him, aping her, the same bullying, cold voice, ‘You take his statement, Tracy. You write it in German. You make him sign every page. Don’t let him wriggle, Tracy, get it out of him.’

  The car’s lights were now bright pinpricks in the black ribbon of the land.

  Krause was tight and silent, Peters was calm and talked.

  ‘I could have gone — you know that, Dieter — I could have gone as Hoffmann went or as Siehl went, or Fischer. I had time to think when I was at Warnemunde, too much time, when I waited for him to return. Who would be interested in me, I thought, a simple Feidwebel who merely obeyed orders? I could have gone, but I stayed, because you made an advantage to me, you offered an opportunity. Don’t believe, Dieter, that I stayed from affection or obligation. I stayed because, when I thought, you provided an opportunity. I stayed because, if I kept you out of the Moabit gaol, I made an advantage for myself.’

  They were on the narrow coast road between Elmenhorst and Nienhagen, going west from Warnemunde and Rostock. Across the beach, and the darkness of the sea, were the fore and aft navigation lights of the trawler. They crawled, minimal speed, to track the trawler.

  ‘I cannot save him. I know what he is to you and to the Army, but I cannot save him and you cannot.’

  The photographs were scattered on the minister’s desk in front of him, and in front of the G
RU General who leaned his weight on the desk. They were the photographs taken that morning, in the street outside the apartment, and the photographs from the file of Mrs Olive Harris. They were, beyond dispute, photographs of the same woman. She talked in the street with Pyotr Rykov, she was listed in the file as deputy head, Russia Desk. He looked from the photographs and into the face of the General.

  The General murmured in the minister’s ear, ‘I have tried, I have tried with all the assets at my disposal, to protect him. I cannot counter this and I do not wish to, and nor should you. Without the photographs I would not have believed it, with the photographs I cannot argue against it. He has destroyed himself.’

  The minister knew that Colonel Pyotr Rykov had been turned away from the doors of the ministry that morning and told that his ID was no longer valid. He knew that Colonel Pyotr Rykov had twice, that afternoon, telephoned the direct number in the outer office, and had been refused by the secretariat his shouted demand to speak with his minister. The Colonel of the intelligence service, who had couriered the photographs to Defence, stood, grave-faced, behind them, at the back of the room. The minister stacked them carefully, then closed the file on the British intelligence officer, Mrs Olive Harris.

  ‘So be it.’ He condemned his man.

  They might take him on the street, throw him into a car. They might go to the apartment and knock down the door with sledgehammers and drag him away down the stairs. He would miss, desperately, the man on whom he leaned, but could not save him.

  The minister handed the photographs and the file to the waiting Colonel.

  The wind had slackened. Josh stood at the wheel. The trawler churned on, the bow dipped and rose, and spray broke across the glass of the windows.

  They were on the floor of the wheelhouse. She sat with her back against the sink cupboard. He was crouched down across the wheelhouse from her.

  Josh listened. Tracy wrote on her pad.

  Willi Muller said, ‘I was at the boat with my father. We were working on it in the evening because there was a problem with the transmission in the engine, and my father said it was necessary to make the repair then. We heard the shooting at the base across the water of the Salzhaff. It was just after the planes had flown over and then there were flares fired there. The base was a closed place to the people of Rerik, we had no contact with the Soviet military there. Because we had no contact we did not know, my father and I, at first, whether this was an exercise or something different. We continued to work at the engine. The shooting seemed to move across the base, from the Ostsee shore, through the middle of the base, through the buildings, and then to the shore of the Salzhaff. They were using the red tracers and the flares. I said to my father that I was frightened, that we should go home, but my father was definite that the repair to the engine must be finished. We worked on. We finished the repair. Two cars came. They were Stasi, from Rostock. The superior told my father that he needed the boat, it was an order. He had a beard, cut narrow on his cheeks and cut close on his chin. They said my father should take them out on the Salzhaff, but my father, and it was a lie, said that his back was hurt, that I would take them. I could have said what my father did not dare to, that the engine was not repaired, but I did not.’

  She finished the page. She passed the notepad to him and he signed his name on the page, a fast, nervous scrawl.

  He pushed himself up and he studied the course Josh held, took the wheel from him, and made an adjustment to the west. He went out of the wheelhouse door, stood on the open pitching deck, and looked towards the black ribbon of land.

  They were on the road between Nienhagen and Heiligendamm. There were stretches of road that veered inland, where they had to strain to see the navigation lights on the sea. On those stretches, Krause drove faster, and when he came back to the sight of the sea and the slow progress of the lights he stopped and waited until the lights of the trawler were level with the car.

  ‘We had, Dieter, a society that was disciplined. We did not have organizations, we did not have opportunities. We lived in the tedium of discipline, and the best we hoped for was a summer vacation at some stinking campsite in Bulgaria or Romania — it was the ultimate of our aspiration. You, I, could not buy advantage. The discipline suffocated us. The Wall came down, the wessis came to look at us as if we were some theme-park amusement, and they laughed at our discipline. Do I complain, Dieter? I can buy a tax inspector, I can buy an official in the department that issues import-export licences, I can buy a policeman, a politician, a priest. I can behave like a Sicilian, the discipline is gone. I can buy a former Hauptman and the purchase will bring me the protection of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. You do not hear me complain, Dieter, do you?’

  The old Makharov pistol lay on his lap as he drove. It was dulled from the years it had lain buried in the plastic bag inside the rubbish bin. He had checked the pistol and believed he would use it that night.

  Tracy shouted at him, waved for him, through the door. He looked again at the lights on the shoreline and ducked back inside the wheelhouse.

  ‘When we were out on the Salzhaff, the flares were fired over a part of the water that was half-way between the Wustrow shore and the Rerik shore. At first I could not see the target, but the man with the beard directed me to that place. There was a contact with the base on the radio and they told the base that the firing should finish. We had a small spotlight on the boat. They told me to switch it on, and then they directed it onto the water. It was when I saw him. He was trying to swim away from the light, but he could not swim strongly. They held the light on him. We went close to him and circled him. I was ordered to go very slowly. He went under, but he must have had the desire to live, because he came again to the surface. They pulled him onto the boat and I could see that he was hit. There was a wound in his upper body and there was a second wound in his leg. He lay on the deck of the boat and he was very still except that he breathed hard. I remember that the men, there were five men from the Stasi, were all excited, and they kicked him on the deck and called him a spy and a saboteur, but I did not hear him say any words. He lay on the deck and he did not defend himself when they kicked him. I was fifteen years old, I was a patrol leader in the FDJ, I believed everything that I was taught at school about the hostile espionage units of the Americans and the British and the Fascist government in Bonn, and I hoped he would die. I hoped he would die, not because he was a spy or a saboteur, but so he would not feel any more the kicking. I brought the boat back to the pier at Rerik. The man with the beard held a pistol close against my face and he told me that I had seen nothing and that I knew nothing. They pulled him from the boat and onto the pier. He was very weak and it was difficult for him to walk and they dragged him along the pier towards where their cars were. I saw his face then, as they dragged him past me on the pier. He was tired, he was weak, he was in pain but, and I remember his face clearly, he did not drop his head. I remember that. . . They took him towards the cars..

  She passed the notepad to him. Its page was covered with her neat close-packed writing. He held her pen and his hand shook. Her eyes never left him. He signed.

  Josh did not think, himself, he could have played so cruel cold with the young man. There was no sympathy, no charity, and he tried to hope that it was merely the strategy she had chosen. She took the page back, and the pen.

  Josh held the wheel steady on the course. The swell had dropped. He thought him more frightened of the animal cruelty, the bullying, of Tracy, than of the car that tracked them along the shoreline. He could not fault the strategy.

  The young man stood beside him and flicked his finger against the dial of the fuel gauge and always it bounced on the red line.

  He went out onto the deck. A rope lashed a fuel can to the port side. He slipped among the fish carcasses. He untied the rope, lifted the engine hatch and funnelled the remaining fuel down into the tank.

  Josh thought the young man could have denied that he had the necessary fuel,
and he thought his courage was supreme. Without the fuel they would not reach Rerik. She had given him, cruel and bullying, the courage to go home.

  * * *

  They were on the road between Heiligendamm and Kuhlungsborn. There was flat swamp ground between the road and the beach, few trees, the cloud had lifted and the wind had dropped. Away across the sea, the lights of the trawler were sharp, bright. The voice beside him dripped on.

  ‘With the ending of the discipline, with the coming of the wessis, so many more opportunities have arrived. I am not talking, Dieter, about running cigarettes out of the East, as the Vietnamese do, and I am not talking about shipping a few cars into the East, as the Poles do, or the trading in immigration from Romania, or keeping whores on the streets, as the Turks do. I am talking, Dieter, about the big opportunities that can be taken from our partnership. Weapons, Dieter. The East floats on weapons. Not rifles, Dieter, not pistols. Weapons that can be bought cheap and sold expensive. Missiles, air-to-air and air-to-ground and ship-to- ship. Heavy mortars. Artillery pieces. Armoured vehicles. If you have dollars they will clear out an armoury for you, you can buy anything. You can go south, to Libya, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Algeria. You can name your price. Chemical, nuclear, anything can be bought in the East and anything can be sold. But, Dieter, I do not want eyes watching me. I wish to be protected. I think we have a good partnership.’

  Beside him, Peters belched.

  The suitcase was at the front door of the house on the Altmarkt, packed. She was on the boat with the red and green navigation lights, and she had the power to tip the suitcase empty.

  Across the seascape was the land, with the car’s headlights, always with them. But ahead, on the closing horizon, was the concentration of lights.

  She was taking him home to his past. His body shook.

  She reached for him. She caught the waterproof coat he wore and rammed his body back against the planks of the wheelhouse, and again. He gasped.