The Waiting Time (15 page)

Chapter Six

W
hat the hell...?’

Josh tried to smile. He was wrecked, chilled, unshaven. He pushed off the wall and swayed.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

It should have been a big speech, heavy with the older man’s wisdom, the world of experience, the lifetime of gathered knowledge. He stretched his spine, tried to stand upright. He knew that he should demonstrate, crystal clear, his authority. He scraped the snow covering off his coat.

He croaked, feeble, ‘I didn’t want to wake them.’

‘That’s not an answer. Why are you here?’

He said, quiet, ‘I came to bring you home.’

There was an impish light in her eyes. She stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Who bought your ticket?’

‘Your mother wanted you brought home. I paid for the ticket.’

She laughed in his face. ‘Bad luck. Bad luck, Mr Mantle, because you wasted your money.’

‘Now, you hear me...’

The big speech was beyond reach. He could have made the speech if she had stood contrite in front of him, if the relief that he had come as deliverer had been on her face. But the laughter caught her face, her mouth and her eyes. She made a mockery of his effort to summon the big words. She had come close to him and her gloved hand smacked the wet snow from his chin and his forehead.

hear me, young woman.’ He tried to speak with the stern tone that he would have used to a sullen kid caught out vandalizing. ‘You should go back inside, get your bag, five minutes, I’m waiting here...’

Her fingers caught at his cheek and pinched hard.

‘... I’m waiting here for you. Five minutes and we leave for the airport. You’re going home, with me, first flight.’

‘You were an officer...’

‘The first flight back to your mother.’

‘Can see you were an officer.’

‘Back where you belong.’

‘When they talk balls, officers always shout.’

The anger surged in him. He pushed away her hand. ‘Listen to me. You are rude, you are impertinent. Learn to be grateful when people go out of their way to help you. What you are trying to do is beyond the capability of a single person acting without resources. Join the real world.’

‘Of course I’m capable — I’m trained.’

‘You were just a typist, a clerk. You are not equipped—’

‘I got the names.’

‘What names?’

‘I couldn’t just go up there, to Rostock and Rerik, blunder about, bang on doors. No bugger would speak to me then. I had to have the names.’

He felt old, and her laughter mesmerized him. The smile played on her mouth. She pulled off her gloves and unzipped her coat. The smile still played at her mouth, mocking. She reached under her sweater, pushed it up. He saw her navel and the narrowness of her waist and the white skin. She pushed her hand up under her sweater, and he saw, a moment, the material of her bra, a flash. She taunted him. She held the piece of paper.

‘There were four eye-witnesses, I have their names. They thought they’d stripped the file, but they missed one sheet of paper. I’ve been in the archive. Not bad for a clerk.’

Josh Mantle sagged back against the wall. A refuse cart turned the corner into Saarbrucker Strasse. He felt a black gloom of inevitability. He felt the suction force puffing him towards deep currents and fire. The cart came slowly down the street, spraying water on the pavement, rotating brushes cleaning the gutter. She waved the paper in front of his face.

He said, weak, ‘You should let me take you home.’

‘You go on your own,’ she said. She folded the paper, neat movements, slipped it into the inside pocket of her anorak.

‘So, you get the bloody speech,’ he said. ‘The speech is, I will stand in front of you, behind you, right side of you, left side. When they come for you, as they will, they will have to flatten me first. Don’t expect the speech again.’

The cart came by them. The water sluiced across the pavement, against her legs. She stood her ground and the water dripped off her.

She said, calm, ‘I don’t need you holding my hand, trailing after my skirt. You want to come, please yourself. I don’t need you.’

‘Where is he?’

Goldstein forced the palm of his hand across his forehead as if to drive out the throbbing ache. ‘He said he was waiting for a telephone call to be returned.’

Raub snapped, ‘Does he think the plane waits for him?’

‘He knows the time of the flight because I told him the time. He said he was waiting for a telephone call, then he had to make some calls.’

Raub revved the engine and exploded fumes into the frosted dawn air. ‘To whom?’

The ache needled his brain. He knew he had talked into the early morning, could not remember what he had talked of. He could remember lurching to his feet, and remember the realization that the Englishman had been ice sober. But he could not remember what he had said. Goldstein snarled, ‘Doktor Raub, I do not know because I did not ask. I just follow after that shit because that is what I am paid to do. He used his mobile phone, digital, so I am not able to check his calls.’

When Krause came, he did not apologize. Goldstein scrambled out into the dawn air to open the door for him, because he was paid to do so. Krause settled in the back of the car.

‘I cannot tell you, Fräulein, the names of the personalities involved, nor can I tell you the tactics they will use. What I do tell you, Fräulein, those personalities and their tactics are directed at one target. The target is Hauptman Dieter Krause.’

The authorities allowed her to wear her own clothes. Albert Perkins thought her older than himself by four or five years. It was difficult to be exact about her age because her complexion was washed out pallid from thirteen months in the cells. She sat stolid before him in a plain grey-green blouse and a plain grey-blue skirt and plain grey ankle socks inside canvas sandals.

‘What you should know, Fräulein, is that I seek specific information that will harm, damage, hurt Hauptman Dieter Krause. The damage to him may not come from you. Perhaps you will give me another name. I want you to believe Fräulein, that in this matter I will walk a long road.’

She was a grey mouse. They were always called the ‘grey mice’. She had been a secretary at the foreign ministry in Bonn. She would have been, in 1978, as plain and physically uninteresting as she was today. The grey mice had been in the foreign ministry and the defence ministry and the Chancellor’s office in Bonn, in the NATO offices and in the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe, in Paris and Washington and, damn sure, in London. They were the spinsters, the plain, uninteresting women fearful of living out their lives alone. They were the women who believed love had gone by them. The grey mice were sought out by intelligence officers.

‘You would have been warned, Fräulein, as to the dangers of an association with an East German. But he didn’t come in those clothes, did he? Younger than you, good-looking, flattering and considerate. What was he? An academic, import-export? Doesn’t matter . . . He told you it was love. And after he’d done the love bit, he asked for those little pieces of unconnected information?

By screwing you, Fräulein, he would have advanced his career, he’d have been promoted. I aim to bury him, but I need help.’

For all those years, after the Wall had come down, the little grey mouse would have sat at her desk in the foreign ministry and wondered, as they all did, how long the secret would be kept. Had the ifie gone to Moscow? Had the file been sold on for hard currency to the Americans? Had the file stayed in the archive for the eventual and inevitable opening by the researchers? God, and the little grey mouse must have sweated, sweated in her heart and her mind and down between her legs. Six years of sweat, waiting for the BfV to come to her desk.

‘Last year, wasn’t it, Fräulein, that he turned up in Cologne and offered himself as a source? First he had to establish his credibility. Told them all about you. Closed court for the part when he testified against you, yes, Fräulein? After he’d testified, his new friends would have taken him for a damn good meal, and you were given ten years. You were a traitor, he was just carrying out the terms of his job description. You betrayed your country, he screwed you and talked of love, which was all part of a good day’s work. Life is unfair, Fräulein, and I’m giving you the chance to make life more fair.’

She spoke quietly.

Albert Perkins had heard that corruption was more widespread in the new greater Germany than ever before. He had slipped a thousand American dollars into the palm of the gaol’s assistant deputy director, arrangements made by the embassy staffer, after the boy, Goldstein, had finally spilled the necessary and been expelled into the night.

She spoke of the agent to whom she had been handed after Dieter Krause had gone back to Berlin, drunk, in her bed, boasting of his next posting, in the office of the minister at Normannen Strasse. She spoke of the second agent who had told her that Dieter Krause was too clever for his own good, too arrogant, was being sent to Rostock to kick his heels and scratch his arse.

He’d write a report on the new corruption, something for a wet winter day at Vauxhall Bridge Cross . . . After he left her, after the cell door shut on her, as he was escorted down the corridor, Albert Perkins made a note on his memory pad to have an embassy staffer send her a box of chocolates.

The cold was in him. He lay hunched with his knees up, and the voices were above him.

He was in the cemetery, the worst day and the worst night, a day of chill rain and a night of bitter sleet. Many times in many months he had walked by the cemetery. Once, an evening, he had taken the courage and gone into the cemetery and sat wet by the earth in darkness, he had slept. . . He had told Libby, insisted on it, that he was not to be mentioned in her will, demanded it of her. He had not married her for her wealth, he had married her for love. After the sickness and the treatment, the death and the funeral, he had walked past the cemetery then gone to find a hedge or a shed for sleep . . . The voices were above him, ‘A disgrace, Officer, a fit and healthy man, should be working — can’t have rubbish like that, Officer, sleeping in a graveyard, a place where people come in grief. Get him out of here, Officer, get that filthy creature out. Disgusting, Officer, when a grown man loses his sense of pride, sinks so low.’ The policeman had pulled him up. The women had watched him with contempt as he had been taken to the car, the policeman’s hand tight in his damp coat sleeve. He had been driven to the police station, had stood in front of the custody sergeant and been read the charge of vagrancy, and the senior partner had crossed the lobby with a chief inspector and recognized him.

‘There are four names. Four men were evicted by the Stasi from Rerik village. Hildegard explained it. They would have identified eye-witnesses, they would have destroyed them, then evicted them. Hildegard said it was what they did to people. I have those names. The names are everything. I get to those people, I get sworn statements, affidavits, I have evidence.’

He was on the wide chair of old and worn leather and a blanket had been laid over him. His movement alerted her.

‘You’ve been asleep for three hours,’ she said dismissively. ‘You snored and you smell. These are Hansie’s parents.’

She was at the table, wolfing alternately from bread on a plate and cereal in a bowl. He tried to smile at the elderly couple and he thought their faces were as old and worn as the leather of the chair. The room had been dark when he had come into it: they had been still asleep.

Tracy said, mouth full, ‘I told them that you’d come after me, had leeched on to me. I told them that I hadn’t thought out how to lose you yet, but I’d work on it.’

Josh crawled from the chair. He stood, stretched. The mother pointed to the food and he shook his head. She tried the coffee pot, and he nodded.

Tracy bored on, ‘They can’t ignore sworn statements, affidavits. However important the bastard is, they have to respond to evidence.’

He massaged the joints of his knees and his hips, and wondered how many times she had said it.

She had not convinced the old man, Hans Becker’s father: ‘You do not understand, there has to be will. There is no will in the new Germany to examine old crimes.’

The parents had lost a son, were victims of the past. He looked around the humble, sparse furnished room, and could not see anything that the present had brought them, still victims. He wondered how it would benefit them if they could go to the court and see a former Stasi officer tried, convicted and taken down. In a crappy world where there was no will then old victims, in the passing of time, were new victims.

He watched the mother. He thought she would have wanted to slap her old hand across Tracy Barnes’s mouth. She had been in their past lives, made the misery, gone, and come back.